Historically black US medical schools perform best on “social mission”

Medical schools in the northeast of the United States are least likely to produce graduates who end up working in primary care, a new analysis shows. Graduates from these schools are also least likely to end up in areas that are underserved by doctors and to come from an ethnic minority, it found. The study, which aimed to score all US medical schools on their ability to meet a “social mission,” found that “historically black” schools performed the best and that public schools performed better than private ones ( Annals of Internal Medicine 2010;152:804-11). “Historically black” institutions are those that were established before 1964 with the intention of serving …