Latino Americans only make up five percent of California’s doctors, according to a recent study at UC-San Francisco, though they constitute one-third of the state’s population.

Fernando Mendoza, Associate Dean for Minority Advising and Programs at the Stanford School of Medicine, said the lack of diversity within the medical profession can actually reduce the effectiveness of physicians.

“A lot of work has been done that’s shown how physicians communicate with patients and the barriers to that communication,” he said. “Studies have reported that there are biases in health care and that they are quite often unconscious; in order to deal with those unconscious biases, we need to diversify the work force and develop more culturally competent positions.”

For the past 14 years, Mendoza has worked with members of the Stanford School of Medicine community to increase the amount of diversity in admitted students. As part of his strategy, Mendoza has tried to implement aggressive outreach programs in the medical school to attract potential underrepresented minority (URM) students.

“We started a program at the med school that targeted mostly premed populations from various campuses,” he said. “We worked in conjunction with our colleagues at the admissions office to address issues of under-representation and recruitment. The program has been bringing URM students to the medical school to see what medical school is really like, as well as helping these students with their applications to medical schools.”

These programs were often funded by the federal government, but due to federal budget cuts in recent years, outreach programs such as these have been canceled.

Mendoza cited several reasons for the gap between the number of Latino doctors and Latino representation in the state population.

“Some reasons for this are that the socioeconomic class of Latinos gives them less ability to go on to colleges,” he said. “Another aspect of it is that they’re perhaps not encouraged to go into those careers. And some of it also has to do with the unconscious cultural biases about who should be and who shouldn’t be physicians.”

In order to increase diversity in the medical school student population, Mendoza also encourages the admission office to evaluate potential candidates on a broader spectrum of criteria.

“One thing I think is evident,” he said. “We’re well behind the curve and have a long way to go to get the number of Latino physicians up to where they represent the proportion of the general population.”

Mendoza said that admission offices shouldn’t look only at the quantitative measures of an applicant’s profile — GPA or MCAT — but should also focus on other less quantifiable characteristics as well.

“What we’ve done at Stanford for the last 30 years is really make an effort to look at students from a broad perspective,” he said. “That is, inclusive of academics and leadership ability. The problem is that our measures by numbers don’t predict the ability of people to think critically and work hard, or measure the passion they have to succeed.”

But Mendoza does not advocate abandoning quantitative measures of success altogether.

“Fundamentally, when you have 6,000 students you don’t have the time to look at everyone as we try to do here at the med school,” he said. “So we ask ourselves: what is the range of scores in which people can be successful? Let’s take that whole group and look at what the characteristics are that make good physicians. Using those kinds of metrics we’ve been able to select people that have been very successful in every area of medicine.”

While critics of this approach to admissions worry that the quality of students admitted to the medical school will be reduced in the name of diversity, Mendoza said that this does not necessarily have to be the case.

“I came as a medical student with affirmative action,” he said. “There were four of us then. Now, I’m a professor here at Stanford, one colleague is head of a children’s hospital in Mexico City and another is quadruple boarded.”

Mendoza ultimately believes that diversity in medical schools and in the physician population will increase the overall effectiveness of healthcare.

“We need to be able to get the kinds of people that will be representative of society’s diversity,” he said. “We can’t do that unless we make an effort to go beyond just the pure numbers.”