By Duke Medicine News and Communications

DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke University Medical Center is one of three partners in a new $3.6 million W.K. Kellogg Foundation program designed to increase the work force diversity of America's health professions.

On Thursday, Sept. 5, representatives from the Kellogg Foundation, the three partner institutions and special guest Louis W. Sullivan, M.D., president emeritus of the Morehouse School of Medicine and former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, will be at Duke for the first meeting of the grant recipients. Duke will receive $1.5 million of the grant and the remainder will be split between the National Institute of Medicine and Community Catalyst, a Boston-based national health consumer advocacy organization.

"We are extremely proud to be part of this important national effort," Ralph Snyderman, M.D., chancellor for health affairs at Duke University and president and CEO of Duke University Health System, said in announcing the gift. "Bringing more diversity into the health professions improves our ability to improve the health of people who are currently not benefiting from significant advances in prevention, diagnosis and treatment."

According to Henrie M. Treadwell, Ph.D., program director at the Kellogg Foundation, Duke was selected from among a number of other medical educational institutions.

"Duke not only says they support diversity, they do it," said Treadwell. "We did not see a better model or a better team. The institution's prestige and the commitment from its president and Medical Center leadership made Duke the pre-eminent choice."

Currently 20 percent of Duke medical students are from under-represented minority groups, and 95 percent graduate in four years or less -- among the highest rates in the country.

Today minorities comprise about 25 percent of the United States population, yet only 6 percent of the country's practicing physicians are Latinos, African Americans and native Americans, according to William C. Richardson, Kellogg Foundation president and CEO.

Earlier this year, the National Institute of Medicine released a report, "Unequal Treatment," that linked minority patients' disproportionately high level of mortality and disease to the lack of a diverse health-care-provider work force. The research showed that African-American and Hispanic physicians see significantly more African-American and Hispanic patients than their white counterparts do.

Another report released in April by Community Catalyst showed that after decades of trying to graduate more minority doctors, teaching hospitals and medical schools continue to use selection criteria and training processes that restrict minorities from entering the medical profession.

Kellogg will provide support to the three partner institutions in pursuing different approaches for increasing diversity in the health care work force, which includes doctors, dentists, nurses and health care administrators.

Duke School of Medicine will form a national blue-ribbon panel to raise public awareness of the problem and examine college and university admissions policies and their impact on minority enrollment. Panel members will be chosen for their leadership in a variety of sectors, including higher education, corporate, entertainment, religion and community advocacy.

Under the direction of Brenda Armstrong, M.D., an associate professor of pediatric cardiology who became Duke University School of Medicine director of admissions in 1995, Duke's percentages of under-represented minorities has increased significantly.

Armstrong herself was a member of only the third Duke University entering undergraduate class to include African Americans in 1966. When she attended medical school at St. Louis University in the early 1970s, she was the only African-American woman in her class. "The environment was quite isolated, and the atmosphere was extraordinarily hostile," Armstrong recalled. "There were few minority faculty, and almost no minority house staff."

At Duke she has implemented an aggressive minority recruitment program and advocated for changes in the admissions process -- such as balancing the traditional heavy reliance on the Medical School Admissions Test (MCAT) against other academic descriptors such as grade point average, strength of curriculum and breadth and depth of curricular choices; improving the diversity of the admissions committee; and defining and identifying human interests and values in the admissions process.

Armstrong said she believes that "members of the health care professions need to look and feel like the people for whom they will be caring, across all platforms -- clinical care, teaching and biomedical research."

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation was established in 1930 to "help people help themselves through the practical application of knowledge and resources to improve their quality of life and that of future generations." Its programming activities center around the common vision of a world in which each person has a sense of worth; accepts responsibility for self, family, community and societal well-being; and has the capacity to be productive and to help create nurturing families, responsive institutions and health communities.

To achieve the greatest impact, the foundation targets its grants toward specific areas. These include: health; food systems and rural development; youth and education; and philanthropy and volunteerism. Within these areas, attention is given to exploring learning opportunities in leadership, information and communication technology; capitalizing on diversity; and social and economic community development. Grants are concentrated in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean and the southern African countries of Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.

For further information, visit the foundation's Web site at www.wkkf.org.