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  • Ophthalmology Residency Programs Still Lack Racial Diversity

    By Lynda Seminara
    Selected by Russell N. Van Gelder, MD, PhD
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    Journal Highlights

    Ophthalmology, August 2022

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    Atkuru et al. assessed the racial make­up of ophthalmology residents and compared their findings with those for residents in other specialties. They found that diversity remains lower in ophthalmology residency programs than in all other specialties. The fields ranked highest for diversity in this study were public health/preventive medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, and family practice.

    For this research, the authors gath­ered 10-year demographic data from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and compared findings for ophthalmology residency programs with those of 17 other med­ical specialties. They applied a linear regression model to estimate trends over time.

    Altogether, more than 1.1 million residents were identified among the 18 specialties, but only 1.1% were enrolled in ophthalmology programs. The low­est proportion of residents from under­represented minority (URM) groups was in ophthalmology (5.4%), followed by other surgical specialties (9.9%) and nonsurgical specialties (10%). Howev­er, from 2011 to 2019, the URM growth rate was marginally higher for ophthalmology residencies (.24%) than for other surgical (.01%) or nonsurgical (.20%) programs. URMs represented only 6.3% of ophthalmology residents in the 2019-2020 academic year; how­ever, URM representation among U.S. medical school enrollees was 18.4% in 2018-2019 and 22.5% in 2021-2022, according to the Association of Ameri­can Medical Colleges.

    Contributors to the low diversity in ophthalmology may be multifactorial, said the authors. Possible reasons in­clude low level of interest, late exposure to ophthalmology in medical school, the competitiveness of residency pro­grams, and the lack of racially diverse role models.

    Although the current Minority Ophthalmology Mentoring program partnership between the Academy and the Association of University Profes­sors of Ophthalmology is a step in the right direction, the authors emphasized that more efforts are needed to address implicit biases and clear other obstacles that deter URM students from pursuing a career in ophthalmology.

    The original article can be found here.