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To the Editor: The study of student body racial and ethnic composition and diversity-related outcomes in US medical schools, by Dr Saha and colleagues,¹ concluded that white medical students graduating from more diverse medical schools are more likely to achieve higher values for "self-rated cultural competence." We question the validity of this 1-question measure and whether this is an accurate predictor of the students being "highly prepared to care for minority populations." There are many measures of cultural competence in the literature with proven reliability and validity² that could have better assessed the significance of their findings.

The authors stated that their findings were no longer statistically significant after adjusting for measures of interactional diversity, which included being exposed to other racial and ethnic groups. Medical students spend the majority of their last 2 years in clinical rotations and, therefore, are likely to be influenced by patient diversity during these . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Lawrence Noble, MD
noblela@nychhc.org
Department of Pediatrics
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Elmhurst, New York

Anita Noble, DNSc
School of Nursing
Hadassah-Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel

Ivan L. Hand, MD
Department of Pediatrics
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Elmhurst

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RELATED ARTICLE

Student Body Racial and Ethnic Composition and Diversity-Related Outcomes in US Medical Schools
Somnath Saha, Gretchen Guiton, Paul F. Wimmers, and LuAnn Wilkerson
JAMA. 2008;300(10):1135-1145.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT  

RELATED LETTER

Cultural Competence and Student Body Composition Among US Medical Students—Reply
Somnath Saha and LuAnn Wilkerson
JAMA. 2009;301(6):596-597.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT