Discussions

I can remember back in 1986, as a first-year medical student, walking down the hallway of Memorial University of Newfoundland and stopping to look at the announcement board.There it was – a paper flyer asking “Are you a female medical student?” Yes, I was! “Are you in financial need?” Yes, I was! “Sign up for FMWC and apply for a $1,000 scholarship.” So I did. And I got the scholarship.

The goal here is not to admonish Canada’s most revered medical organizations, but rather to illustrate the historic and longstanding dearth of Black representation in Canadian medical leadership. Over the past few years, calls to address barriers to achieving diversity in the Canadian health workforce have been gaining momentum. Diversity exists along a broad spectrum that includes gender, socioeconomic, linguistic, and racial subsets, to mention a few. Acknowledging that there exist many populations that are also underrepresented in the highest echelons of Canadian medical leadership, this article speaks specifically to the paucity of Black Canadians in formal physician leadership roles while proposing four key recommendations for addressing this diversity gap.