Widening Access to Medical School for the clinician: our responsibilities

Authors

  • Gemma Lee Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust

Abstract

There is a widely held belief that doctors should be as representative as possible of the society they serve in order to provide the best possible care to the UK population1. However, currently, people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are underrepresented in medicine, with only 11.5% growing up in households that received income support, 8.3% receiving free school meals and just 6.3% having been brought up in the most deprived areas of the UK.This is regrettable not least because when it comes to both gender and race, medicine has made impressive progress over recent years. Its success in recruiting more women and ethnic minority doctors indicates that with the right level of intentionality the medical profession can also throw open its doors to a far broader social intake than it does at present.

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Published

2018-12-12

Issue

Section

Articles