Awareness Campaign

#BLACKDOCSBELONG

About the Campaign

We are raising awareness about the devastating dismissals of Black residents: Black residents make up 5% of the residency workforce but account for 20% of dismissals—for reasons often ignored for their non-Black peers.

Residents are wholly dependent on residency programs, a system that has become a gatekeeper instead of an education for many, thus robbing patients of future physicians and destroying careers after years of hard work and usually with more than $200,000 of debt.

Once residents are targeted or dismissed, there is little recourse. No entity is responsible for protecting individual residents. Legal avenues do not provide timely relief, which makes relocating to a different residency program more difficult.

We cannot achieve health equity for Black patients without expanding the Black physician workforce.

Campaign Events

Galveston, Texas
Juneteenth Festival

June 17 & 18, 2023

Nearly 1,000 people attended the 2-day Galveston Juneteenth Festival. Black Doc Village took to the stage & set up a vendor tent to educate the masses about the inequitable dismissal of Black resident physicians in the midst of the staggering health disparities suffered by the Black community. Each one left with an informational postcard and a clip-on hand sanitizer with our logo!

Just ahead of this event Dr. Grubbs authored an opinion piece, “CMS Must Act To Ensure A Diverse Physician Workforce.” Published in Healthcare Business Today, the piece called for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to mandate residency programs to report attrition data with explanations as a step towards stemming the excess attrition of Black resident physicians. As a primary investor in medical residency training (otherwise known as graduate medical education, GME), the US Department of Health and Human Services, through CMS, provides tens of billions of dollars each year—$16.2 billion of public tax dollars in 2021 alone— to graduate medical education. CMS has the power to produce the types of physicians our increasingly diverse nation needs.

Kick-Off Demonstration

Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine
Pasadena, California
August 26, 2022

Have you ever seen a bunch of doctors protesting? Well, on Friday, August, 26, 2022 — the second anniversary weekend of Dr. Khoury’s dismissal from the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine — we did just that. Dozens of colleagues, friends, family, and co-conspirators came together to raise our voices against the unjust punishment and dismissals of Black medical students, trainees, and attending physicians. And this is just the beginning

Press coverage includes this article in the San Diego Voice & Viewpoint by Solomon O. Smith: Black Doctors March Shine Spotlight on Institutionalized Racism

This article in Time by Jamie Ducharme, which also marks the second anniversary of Dr. Khoury’s suspension from the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine: U.S. Medical Schools Are Struggling to Overcome Centuries of Racism in Health Care

And this article just before the event by Kisha Smith, L.A. Focus: New Campaign Calls Attention to Unjust Dismissals of Black Doctors from Hospitals and Med Schools

Photo Credits: Malcolm Ali and Jasmyne Cannick