Ivy Lawson and Adam Meadows awarded scholarships
By Meliqueica Meadows
Of the St. Louis American
The Mound City Medical Forum (MCMF) Scholarship Banquet was held last Saturday at the Renaissance Grand Hotel. While awards and scholarships for four Washington University and Saint Louis University medical students were handed out, the main focus of the evening was the topic of health care disparities among people of color.
Dr. James Kimmey, president and CEO of the Missouri Foundation for Health, provided the keynote address on eliminating health-care disparities through community collaborations. Dr. Kimmey compared the current crisis in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the health-care crisis many people of color face in America.
“The second disaster, the one absent from television and global consciousness, is the wide disparity of health status and health services in this country based on race, ethnicity, socio-economic status and residence,” Dr. Kimmey said.
“Just as we as a society should be shamed by the slow pace or inadequacies of government’s response to Katrina, so should we be about the lack of response to growing gaps among racial and ethnic groups in this country when it comes to health. The very existence of health disparities in the American public and population erodes our pretensions of having equality of opportunity, moral leadership and the best medicine in the world.”
Dr. Kimmey read a list of disparities affecting African Americans in Missouri, and the statistics were grim. According to Kimmey, African-American mothers in Missouri are two and a half times more likely to receive inadequate prenatal care than white moms, and in the city they are four times less likely to receive adequate prenatal care than whites.
For African-American babies, the picture is just as bleak. The rate of infant death among black babies in Missouri is 2.6 times that for white babies, and an African-American baby is twice as likely to have a low birth weight. Dr. Kimmey also said the rates of communicable diseases in Missouri’s African-American population are seven times higher than in the white population.
“African-American men have the shortest life expectancy of any group at about 63.9 years. When you look at some areas in Central Missouri and in St. Louis city, the life expectancy for African-American males is only slightly over 60 years,” Dr. Kimmey said. “This compares favorably with most of the Central African countries and some of the other Third World countries when you look at United Nations data.”
He said many erroneously think the short life span of African-American men is due to violence, but violence is not the issue.
“The major factor in short life span for African Americans compared to whites is cardiovascular disease and stroke – preventable diseases – not crime.”
If the major factors contributing to the short life expectancy of African Americans and other people of color are preventable, why then do many find themselves lacking when it comes to health care?
Dr. Kimmey said access to health insurance is one of the main barriers for African-American health care. One in five blacks lack medical insurance, compared to one in nine whites and one in three Hispanics. Clinics located in areas populated by people of color are often poorly funded, inadequately staffed and thus provide a lower quality of health care.
“Genetics are not the problem here,” Dr. Kimmey said.
“Health disparities are not about race and ethnicity in a cultural or biological sense; rather, they result from racism and social and institutional manifestations.”
To properly address disparities, Dr. Kimmey said one must understand the ways in which racism affects the lives of people of color in this country.
“Racism in the United States’ society exists on an interpersonal, institutional and structural level, and these levels impact health and create disparities.” Kimmey said these disparities result from bias and stereotypes held by some individual health care professionals and differential treatment of patients of color.
He said the way to combat health disparities based on race and socioeconomic status is with increased awareness and by improving the geographic and financial access of people of color to health-care services. His organization, the Missouri Foundation for Health, is the largest health foundation in Missouri and one of the top 50 such foundations in the nation. The goal of the foundation is to improve health care for underserved populations.
Dr. Consuelo H. Wilkins is the president of the Mound City Medical Forum, the collective voice for African-American doctors in the region. The organization works to promote the art of medicine, science and the betterment of public health. Founded in 1920, MCMF is a component society of the National Medical Association.
Each year, the Mound City Medical Forum provides two scholarships to a medical student from both Saint Louis University and Washington University. This year’s recipients are Ivy Lawson, a second-year medical student at SLU, and Adam Meadows, a second-year medical student at WU.
“Now more than ever, MCMF is dedicated to supporting and mentoring African-American medical students,” Dr. Wilkins said.
“Despite decades of progress toward increasing the numbers of women and Asian medical students, African Americans are still underrepresented in medical schools. Since African-American physicians are more likely to care for African-American patients, supporting the education of these students is essential to decreasing health-care disparities.”
Dr. Wilkins said that according to the Association of American Medical Colleges latest figures, about 1,150 of the 15,350 students admitted in 2002 to the nation’s 126 medical schools – 7.6 percent – were African Americans. Since 13 percent of the U.S. population is African-American, there is a more than 40 percent shortage of African-American doctors.
Although a number of factors keep African Americans from attending medical school, the cost of a medical education is a huge contributor, Dr. Wilkins said. Scholarships like those provided by MCMF can help ease the financial burden of highly qualified students. MCMF has awarded more than $50,000 in scholarships.