A Look at How the AMA Supports Members and Otolaryngologists at Large

Working Toward Equity

The American Medical Association (AMA) recognizes systemic and structural racial inequity as a major threat to public health. In 2020, the organization’s House of Delegates (HOD) held a special meeting to discuss this threat and seek ways to close current alarming racial gaps in health outcomes and life expectancy. Together, they adopted three key policies to acknowledge racism as a primary driver of racial health inequality, recognize race as a social construct, support ending the practice of using it as a proxy for genetic ancestry or biology in medical education, research, and clinical practice, and encourage characterizing race as a social construct and support the description of race as a risk factor (and, as such, a proxy for influences such as structural racism).

These policies are further outlined in “Race, Racism, and the Policy of 21st Century Medicine,” an essay written by members of the AMA Center for Health Equity and published in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine in 2021

As an active representative body, the AMA is advocating for increased equity and diversity on numerous fronts, from testifying before Congress on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people of color to pressuring insurance companies to remove structurally racist barriers to optimal care for opioid use disorder.

A key element toward achieving true health equity relies on establishing greater diversity in the physician workforce. “There’s evidence that health outcomes, compliance, and patient satisfaction increase when patients perceive that their physicians share some aspect of their background,” said Shannon Pryor, MD, a Washington, D.C.-based otolaryngologist, immediate past president of MedChi, the Maryland State Medical Society, and a member of the AMA HOD. “The AMA Center for Health Equity is helping to increase access to care and quality of care for all of our patients, and diversity in the physician workforce will be an important part of that journey.” 

The effort extends to addressing gender inequity, which still exists across a wide swath of the medical world, particularly in otolaryngology, although conditions are improving. “There were relatively few women in the department where I trained as a resident, but decades later, in the department where I now work, there have been resident classes that are entirely female,” said Dr. Pryor. “I was the first chair of the AMA’s Women Physicians Section, and it was humbling to be able to help with the task of crafting a vision for how we would build on the work of those who came before us toward gender equity for women in medicine and also for better healthcare for female patients.

“I’m happy to see the demographics changing in more than just the gender dimension,” she continued. “Not only could this diversification lead to more culturally competent care, it could also encourage the best and brightest to see medicine as a welcoming and attainable profession.”