Abstract
Background: As part of our social accountability mandate, the University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine produced a sociodemographic picture of our region’s residents, including gender, race/ethnicity, language, and neighbourhood of residence, in order to contribute to a representative healthcare workforce that can address the specific needs of our underserved communities.
Approach: For our 2023 medical school cohort, we obtained data from the Ontario Medical Student Applicant Service Survey which is a mandatory component for all Ontario medical school applications and includes questions pertaining to first language and nine other equity, diversity, and inclusion factors. We compared these data to regional demographic data held at the Ottawa Neighbourhood Study, and linked the postal codes of students to their location of residence during high school to map their geographic contexts of origin. We developed a dynamic dashboard, accessible to faculty, students, and the community.
Results: Among the 183 students in the 2023 MD cohort, only 22.4% came from designated priority regions, with few from rural areas or First Nations communities. Analysis revealed an overrepresentation of students from higher socioeconomic neighbourhoods, with just 28.2% of Ottawa-based students from the most socioeconomically disadvantaged quintiles, compared to 51.2% from the most advantaged. Our cohort was more diverse than our community with respect to non-official first languages, second and third generation status, and non-White self-reported race, but had an inadequate representation of certain priority groups (e.g., Black and Indigenous students). We found overrepresentation of students with at least one parent completing each of the higher levels of education compared to adults in the region (e.g. bachelor’s degree (51.4% vs 25.0%)), and more with parents working in education (30.1% vs 16.5%) and health (15.8% vs 7.5%) than regional comparisons. In addition, compared to our region’s residents, far more students came from the highest earning households (32.8% vs 13.2%).
Implications: These insights have important implications for our future regional health workforce. First, they have guided targeted outreach initiatives to high schools in underrepresented areas. Second, they have informed our new regional admissions mandate, which includes a target of at least 50% of our medical school cohort from our priority region, and goals for specific representation streams. Third, we are revising our curriculum to ensure that the cases students encounter in their training reflect the social and demographic profiles of students they will care for in clinical practice. This initiative offers a replicable model for other institutions aiming to strengthen their healthcare workforce by aligning admissions and curriculum with their social accountability mandates. By ensuring medical students are representative of diverse communities, the initiative supports a more equitable healthcare system and builds a workforce prepared to meet the needs of underserved populations.