As a top producer of minority health practitioners, a University of Illinois at Chicago program seeks to improve the quality of medical care in communities of color.
Terry Mason was a recent college graduate from the South Side of Chicago trying to get accepted into medical school at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1974. Raised in a rough neighborhood with gang violence, he knew it wouldn’t be easy.
“At that time my grades weren’t the greatest, and my MCAT scores weren’t the greatest … but it wasn’t a reflection of my ability,” says Mason, now a urologist and commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health.
He credits his success to a UIC program that began in 1968 to attract and train minority medical students. Mason earned his medical degree in 1978, the year the Illinois Legislature expanded the program, renaming it the Urban Health Program, in efforts to address the lack of Black health care providers in the area where Mason grew up and Chicago’s West Side.
Since then, UHP has contributed to UIC being the nation’s top nonhistorically Black institution in producing Black, Hispanic and American Indian health care professionals. The school notes that about 70 percent of Black and Hispanic doctors working in the Chicago metropolitan area graduated from the university and at least 60 percent of Black, Hispanic and American Indian doctors, nurses, dentists and other health care providers in Illinois participated in UHP. The program will celebrate its 30th anniversary next year.
