C. Beyond Accommodation

      As this Article demonstrates, there are immense benefits to accommodating patients' racial preferences in the hospital setting, including improving the quality of care provided to minority populations and addressing racial and ethnic health differentials. Nevertheless, this Article has shown that this practice is not without its limitations, as it offers neither a complete nor a fully satisfying solution to the problems of race-based health disparities and physician bias. To devise appropriate, long-term means of addressing these concerns, the medical profession must go beyond accommodating patients' racial preferences to expanding cultural awareness at all levels of practice and training to enable providers to interact more effectively with various patient populations. The profession must also increase diversity among providers as a means of encouraging tolerance and understanding of other cultures.

      In order to train physicians to better comprehend and address the specific needs of a diverse patient population, in recent years, the medical profession and medical schools have focused on providing culturally competent care, which, according to the IOM, requires the provision of care “that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values.” The idea behind culturally competent care is the promotion of greater “physician understanding of social, cultural, and economic factors that influence their patients,” and the fostering of an effective patient-physician relationship. Thus, the American College of Physicians, the largest medical specialty society in the United States, recommends that “[p]hysicians and other health care professionals must be sensitive to cultural diversity among patients and recognize that preconceived perceptions of minority patients may play a role in their treatment and contribute to disparities in health care among racial and ethnic minorities.”

      Cultural-competency training is necessary at all levels of medical education and professional practice, as a 2011 Johns Hopkins study found that medical students may actually learn to treat nonwhite patients differently from white patients. While survey data shows that virtually all medical residents recognize the importance of addressing cultural-competency issues, nearly one in five believes that they were ill prepared to care for individuals who did not share their Anglo-American cultural beliefs regarding the practice of medicine. Many medical residents also report that they lack professional mentorship in the area of cross-cultural care and are seldom evaluated on their cultural-competency skills.

      Therefore, although cultural-competency training is critical to fostering trust and communication--two elements necessary to an effective physician-patient relationship--and to improving health outcomes and reducing health disparities, studies make clear that more needs to be done to bridge the gap. Medical schools must also create an environment where students can interact with a racially and ethnically diverse cohort, faculty, and community of mentors because this, as much as textbooks and clinical learning, is a necessary and integral part of a quality medical education and an important means of promoting understanding between future physicians and their prospective patients. Yet, despite the fact that research reveals that students in a diverse student body demonstrate better cultural competency and cross-cultural training than those trained in a more racially and ethnically homogeneous academic environment, of more than 16,000 medical school graduates in 2008, only 2447 were African American, Hispanic, or Native American.

      Among the many benefits of a multicultural medical school environment is its potential to increase the racial and ethnic diversity within the ranks of the profession. Members of racial and ethnic minority populations are severely underrepresented in the medical profession. Although African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans constitute over 25 percent of the nation's population, in 2007 African Americans accounted for only 3.5 percent, Hispanics 5 percent, and Native Americans and Native Alaskans 0.2 percent of physicians.

      A multicultural physician workforce that reflects the country's racial and ethnic diversity and that is more representative of the patients it serves may not only improve patient satisfaction, strengthen cultural competence, and promote sensitivity and tolerance among health professionals; it may also facilitate quality care and reduce physician biases along with the need for the accommodation of patients' racial preferences.