Years ago a lawyer friend who's computer system I maintained told me that pound for pound Southern University Law School was a better fit for the type of law that he intended to practice. Instead of shooting for a big time Wall Street law firm or executing plans to get into the clique within Washington DC federal government circles - he planned to practice the type of legal representation that is most common among the people. This would be the basic community legal representation, accident & injury, and medical claims practice of law. In his estimation Southern University and other Black law schools gave him the skills necessary to be a competent court room attorney. The legal theories that the well heeled Ivy League schools fail to adequately prepare an attorney for such. Not to mention the tremendous debt that an Ivy League trained attorney would have after graduation as compared to these others.
The point of this diversion is that the aspirations for the "elite" schools do not always match the real work needs of the community.
The news that Howard University Medical School and Morehouse Medical School are producing the primary care physicians that the under served communities need the most comes as no surprise to me. In my years of following the good works of the Atlanta based Morehouse Medical School the fact that they have a string of community medical clinics is a testimonial of their interests in the community.
In my frequent critiques of "Multiple-Taxpayer Paid Health Care" regarding the increased competency of the Black Community to provide professional service agents that allow the community to express the desired standard of living - Morehouse and these other schools that are noted go a long way in providing an answer.
Graduates of medical schools at historically black universities such as Howard and Morehouse are the most likely to practice the kind of medicine especially needed under the health-care overhaulthan graduates of elite medical schools at universities such as John Hopkins, Northwestern and Vanderbilt in the Annals of Internal Medicine ranked medical schools based on the communities where their graduates worked and whether those doctors practiced primary care. The Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Howard University College of Medicine in the District and Meharry Medical College in Nashville ranked as the top three, in that order.
By the study's "social mission" criteria, other well-known medical schools ranked far lower. Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville was last among the 141 ranked schools and Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago was 139th. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore ranked 122nd.
The United States faces a shortage of up to 100,000 primary-care doctors in 2020, six years after the health-care overhaul fully kicks in with more than 35 million newly insured Americans. Yet elite medical schools place a stronger focus on specialized medicine and research, the study said. They also lag in recruiting underrepresented minorities -- Latinos, Native Americans and African Americans -- who tend to fill the openings created by the shortage.
No comments:
Post a Comment