The under-representation of minority ethnic groups in academic general practice.

Abstract

General practice has a diverse training programme. It is majority female (57%) and more than half of all trainees are from an ethnic minority, according to the GMC workforce report 2022. However, we are not seeing the same representation of ethnic minorities in academic general practice, with 85.1% of GP professors being White. To determine if ethnic minorities are fairly represented in general practice academia, using the National Academic GP Training Conferences as a proxy. The programmes of the last five National Academic GP Training Conferences were searched and demographic information about the speakers was sought through online sources. Data were compared to demographic data available of non-academic GPs. A freedom of information request was made to Health Education England (HEE) to determine the demographic data of GP academic clinical fellows (ACF). Between the years of 2018 and 2022 there was an average of 40 speakers at the conference. The majority of speakers were White females, appearing an average of 20.2 times. Black females were the least represented, appearing an average of 0.4 times. Data available from HEE on the demographics of new ACFs for 2022 revealed that 27 (71%) of the 38 (excluding 5 who did not state their ethnicity) were White. With such a diverse training scheme, we need to have a better representation of ethnic minorities in GP academia. There is a clear problem recruiting or attracting people from ethnic minorities to an academic career and work needs to be done to understand and overcome those barriers.