Medical students Kiran Kondaveeti, Ani Chawdry and Christian Robles lead a presentation at Thursday’s Diversity Learning Lunch.

Bringing more minorities into the health care professions will do more than just make those professions more diverse, a group of USF medical students said at a campus forum Thursday.

It could save lives.

When doctors and patients can’t understand each other, whether because of language or cultural barriers, the patients suffer, said three first-year medical students who led Thursday’s Diversity Learning Lunch seminar. All three students – Christian Robles, Ani Chawdry, and Kiran Kondaveeti – are studying in the medical school’s scholarly concentration in health disparities.

The trio presented a video about the difficulties that Florida farm workers face in getting access to health care. They also reminded their audience of some sobering statistics, showing that death rates for young adult Hispanics and African-Americans are signficiantly higher than those for young adult whites.

Part of the answer to solving that problem, they said, is to bring more minorities into the health care field.

“If you don’t have good communication between doctors and patients, it’s going to create problems,” Kondaveeti said.

That task has challenges as well. African-Americans represent over 12 percent of the U.S. population, but only 4.4 percent of doctors; Hispanics, 12.5 percent of the population and only 5.1 percent of doctors. Those groups lag behind in medical school enrollment as well.

Students attending Thursday’s lunch included Alyssa Brown, right.

Minority students face more obstacles in education, income and language on the path to medical school, the Council on Graduate Medical Education has found. But Robles pointed out that the council noted a bright spot. Those students who stay in school are just as likely as their white counterparts to go on to medical school.

The group discussed ways to help minority students reach medical school.

“Maybe having students like us go out into the community and show them that it is possible to become a doctor,” Robles said. “No one is showing them what they can become.”

Group members also stressed that every medical student needs to think about diversity. African-American doctors will see Asian and white patients as well as black ones, pointed out Alyssa Brown, a third-year medical student who attended Thursday’s forum.

“As a physician, it will be important that I’m comfortable treating all my patients,” she said.

The event was organized by the Office of Student Diversity and Enrichment.

— Story by Lisa Greene, USF Health Communications
— Photos by Eric Younghans, USF Health Communications