The current state of health equity and medical education were key topics at a webinar on Tuesday sponsored by Rutgers University’s Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, and Justice. The Proctor Institute – housed in the Rutgers-New Brunswick Graduate School of Education – hosted the event in honor of Black History Month.
Dr. Louis Sullivan
The webinar, "Fireside Chat: A Half Century of Equity in Medicine," kicked off with a discussion with Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), founding dean and now president emeritus of the Morehouse School of Medicine, and co-founder of the Association of Minority Health Professions Schools (AMHPS).
Sullivan discussed his latest book, We’ll Fight It Out Here: A History of the Ongoing Struggle for Health Equity, which chronicles the history and impacts of AMHPS.
The inspiration to form AMHPS came to Sullivan at a National Medical Association meeting when he was developing the medical school at Morehouse College in 1975. At that time, there were two predominantly Black medical schools in the U.S., Howard University’s College of Medicine and Meharry Medical College, he said.
“I was very surprised that I found myself in a room of concerned people," Sullivan said. “They wanted to know what the impact of this new school would have on the two existing medical schools, Howard and Meharry. Would we be diluting their funding by coming into being? I had to explain that what we hoped to do was to enhance the number of African Americans and other minorities going into medicine and we certainly did not intend and would work to make sure that we did not dilute the funding.
“As the result of that meeting, we thought, rather than working in isolation, perhaps we can form an association and work together to expand the level of funding for these schools. Because at that time – and still today – predominantly Black higher educational institutions are not sufficiently funded."
AHMPS – founded in 1976 – now has 12 members. It ranges the disciplines of medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, and veterinary medicine. Members include the likes of Howard’s College of Medicine, Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science, Morehouse School of Medicine, and Tuskegee University’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
