Residency Program Diversity Recruitment and Education: Survey of Efforts and Barriers to Implementation

OBJECTIVE: Examine underrepresented minority (URM) recruitment and diversity education initiatives provided by residency programs in ophthalmology and other specialties, and identify means to support programs as they work to enhance diversity efforts. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. SETTING: Multi-center survey of residency program leadership of the Association of University Professors of Ophthalmology, Johns Hopkins Medicine, University of Utah, and the University of California, Los Angeles. PARTICIPANTS: Residency program leadership (i.e., residency program directors and associate residency program directors) RESULTS: Our survey response rate was 34% (63/188); 56% percent of responses were from ophthalmology and 44% were from other specialties. Across all specialties, programs with a large number of clinical faculty and trainees were associated with having ≥1 URM resident in their program (p = 0.026 and p = 0.028, respectively). There was no significant difference between ophthalmology and other specialties with regard to the number of URM residents. Ninety-two percent of programs utilized strategies to recruit URM applicants. While certain strategies were more common for ophthalmology than other specialties, information sessions for URM students (62%) and a unique review of all URM residency applicants by a separate committee/person (46%) were most commonly used overall. Although 92% of residency program leadership believed it was highly important for health professionals to receive formal diversity training, only 54% of programs had a diversity education curriculum for both trainees and faculty, 11% had a curriculum for faculty only, and 3% had a curriculum for trainees only. Barriers to implementation of curricula included lack of faculty expertise (30%) and curricular time (30%). CONCLUSIONS: An overwhelming majority of programs in our study utilized strategies to recruit URM applicants, but 22% had 0 URM residents in their program. To address the reported barriers to diversity education implementation, shared central resources/diversity education toolkits should be created to provide programs with needed support.