A carving of a caduceus on the Howard University campus in Washington, DC. Howard is one of the universities ranked highly in the Fitzhugh Mullan study. (Credit:
tacomabibelot).
Click here to listen to lead author Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan and Dr. John Prescott from the AAMC debate the study on WBUR, Boston’s NPR station.
As the U.S. girds for an influx of newly-insured patients under health reform, attention is shifting to whether medical schools are producing doctors that meet the country’s health care needs. Helping to spark this debate is a recent study that ranks U.S. medical schools in a new, provocative way: on the extent to which they produce doctors who practice primary care, work in underserved areas, and are minorities.
By measuring schools against this “social mission” criteria, Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan of George Washington University and his colleagues (with support from the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, a Burness client) have created a new “best medical schools” list that turns traditional rankings on their head. Historically black schools Morehouse School of Medicine, Meharry Medical College and Howard University lead the pack (PDF), while more “prestigious” medical schools such as Vanderbilt, Duke, Stanford and Johns Hopkins fall into the bottom 20.
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