Cook County Health’s Residency Recruitment Strategy: Racial Discrimination

The medical residency is an essential part of physician education, enabling medical students to continue their training with hands-on experience. As such, residency positions can be highly coveted.

Yet Cook County Health’s Emergency Medicine residency program uses recruiting tactics that indicate it prefers certain racial groups to snag these spots.

Take CCH’s Diversity Externship Scholarship, which provides selected medical students with an opportunity to work at its facilities as well as a $1,000 stipend for expenses.

According to the scholarship’s eligibility criteria, only “[m]edical students in their 4th year of training from a traditionally underrepresented ethnicity (African American, Latino, Native American/Alaska Native, Pacific Islander/Native Hawaiian), gender identification, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status” can apply.

This is a cut-and-dry example of racial discrimination.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

In response to a public records request from Do No Harm, CCH provided its protocol for dealing with applicants based on their race.

“Applicants who self-identify as either underrepresented (as defined by the AAMC to include African American, Hispanic or Latino, and Native American applicants) or female in their official […] applications are contacted by our residents via telephone in the winter of their application year to ensure that they have no residual questions regarding the experiences of representative residents within our residency program,” CCH stated.

This might not seem that consequential, but when coupled with CCH’s explicitly discriminatory scholarship program, it reflects a deeply-embedded commitment to racial preferences.

And this commitment is further evident in CCH’s own description of its discriminatory initiatives; Do No Harm obtained a letter sent from CCH to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) regarding the accreditation status of its Emergency Medicine program.

Among other things, the letter listed the CCH Emergency Medicine residency program’s diversity activities.

“The program continues to sponsor three diversity scholarships for visiting fourth year

medical students annually,” the letter stated, referring to the Diversity Externship Scholarship.

Additionally, “the program continues to sponsor monthly informal in person recruitment dinners targeted specifically to visiting URM and female medical students and hosts annual virtual informational sessions specifically for interested URM and female applicants.”

“URM” in this context refers to students “underrepresented in medicine” which CCH previously defined as including individuals who are African American, Latino, Native American/Alaska Native, and/or Pacific Islander/Native Hawaiian.

But CCH’s discriminatory behavior doesn’t stop there; the program “continues to host call-back sessions for our interview applicants who identify as URM, female, or LGBTQ+,” and “continues to promote residents from underrepresented groups into leadership positions, with 3 of the 4 incoming chief residents identifying as female, one as African American, and one as a member of the LGBTQ+ community.”

Simply put, CCH is engaging in clear racial favoritism. 

This practice is unethical and contrary to the foundational principles of medical ethics.