Supporting Black excellence in Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry

Photo credit: Christina Kebede

“A system that is not equitable is not healthy.”

- Dr. Eniola Salami, Family physician, assistant professor of medicine and Black Health lead

When Adesewa Adeleye was first admitted to medical school in 2019, she was thrilled to see two other Black faces on the new students’ Facebook page. 

“I had heard both from within my community and outside my community that there aren’t many Black doctors,” she recalls. “I was told that immigrants don’t really become doctors here. You don't know the system. You don’t have connections.”

Born in Nigeria, Adeleye had moved to Canada in 2008 with her family. Despite the discouraging messages, she dreamed of going to medical school and, thanks to mentors and her own determination, she made it. Adeleye is now a third-year pediatrics resident with plans to become a pediatric rheumatologist.

Adeleye and four other Black medical students at the University of Alberta teamed up to form the Black Medical Students’ Association (BMSA) after George Floyd was brutally murdered by police in Minneapolis in May of 2020. The U.S. Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum around the world, prompting individuals and institutions to examine anti-Black racism in Canada too. The new BMSA drafted Calls to Action: Recommendations to Address Racial Disparities in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry.

Since then the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry — led by the new Black Health lead in concert with the BMSA and the broader Black community — has made a concerted effort to review and update everything from the admissions process to the curriculum and professional development for staff, all with the aim of improving access for qualified Black medical students. 

Photo 2: Adesewa Adeleye, Black Medical Students Association 

At the latest count, 25 students who self-identify as Black are now enrolled in the MD program among a student body of about 160. 

“A system that is not equitable is not healthy,” says family physician and assistant professor of medicine Eniola Salami, who is charged with working tirelessly to bring the calls to action to life as Black Health lead. 

“When people — regardless of the colour of their skin, their cultural background, their social position — have the opportunity to access a health-care system that is inclusive and anti-racist and high functioning, everybody benefits.”

Addressing historical barriers

Salami grew up in Calgary, the daughter of immigrants from Nigeria. She has lived the challenges she is working to overcome for students now.

“Just growing up being a Black person in Alberta and experiencing racism, watching my parents experience racism — the beauty of that experience but also the difficulty of that experience — and having a real visceral understanding of systemic injustice, that inspired me to really want to be involved in policy change,” Salami recalls.

At first she thought she would pursue law, but after doing her undergrad in health sciences at the University of Calgary, she was drawn to medicine. All the same, she battled doubts as one of the very few Black students in the medical school. 

“There were a lot of wonderful things in my training, but being one of the only Black students in a sea of students that don’t look like you and a sea of people who train you who don’t look like you either, it was hard to see myself succeeding,” she says.

One of the first changes FoMD made was to address historical inequities and barriers in the admissions process, with the new Black Applicant Admissions Program introduced for the 2020-21 school year. 

“Really what we’re aiming for is equity in our admissions opportunities,” says psychiatry professor Laura Stovel, who is assistant dean of admissions. “We’re also aiming for social accountability, so that our medical school class will reflect our population and our communities.”

Importantly, there are no quotas or reserved seats for Black applicants, who must meet exactly the same academic and non-academic requirements as others. Rather, applicants who identify as Black will have one of their three independent file reviewers come from the Black community. 

“It’s meant to allow people to have some safety in discussing things that can be quite challenging to disclose (such as experiences of anti-Black racism) and to also know that some of the value and the lessons that can be learned from those experiences can be interpreted correctly,” explains Adeleye.

Photo 3: Laura Stovel, Assistant Dean of Admissions, Undergrad Medical Education, FoMD

Three new student awards will soon be available for Black students, in acknowledgement of the high cost of a medical education. The first awards will be given out this spring, with $4,500 each for a new and a returning student, and an academic excellence award of $1,000 for a graduating student. There are hopes to expand the program in the future with donor support.

Since 2021, Salami has pushed to expand the curriculum for learning doctors. It now includes four hours of lectures and discussions about anti-Black racism and how to counter it within the health-care system. Faculty and clinical staff receive regular anti-racism training. In March 2024, the University of Alberta launched Black Canadians: History, Presence, and Anti-Racist Futures, an online on-demand course taught by Distinguished Professor Andy Knight. The course is open to the public and is completed by all students before entering the MD program.

Other innovations to meet the calls to action so far include:

• The annual Black Health Fair is held by the BMSA — with support from Salami and other faculty — to encourage Black high school and undergraduate students to consider a career in health care and to provide health information to the wider community.
• As part of the Anti-Racism Commitment to Change task force, Salami also led the move to create one of the only racism reporting processes in the country, collecting and publishing information on racist incidents, tracking where and how they occur and what is being done to address them. 
• Two student counsellors in the Office of Advocacy and Wellbeing have lived experience, as well as clinical expertise, in racial trauma and anti-racist practice. 
• New guidelines on fairness and bias are available for faculty and staff search committees.  

More work to do

The latest Canadian Medical School Report Card, 2023-24 from the Black Medical Students’ Association of Canada gives the U of A three A’s and a C for its progress towards meeting the goals of the calls to action. The group emphasizes that by making medical school more accessible to Black students, they are also addressing disparities in care and outcomes for Canada’s Black population. 

That resonates with Halimat Ibrahim, a founder of the Black Pharmacy Students’ Association at the U of A. Now a second-year medical student, she’s this year’s president of the BMSA. Ibrahim moved from Nigeria to Peace River, Alta., when she was 11 years old. 

“There were not a lot of Black people in Peace River, so when my mom had some health conditions there were no physicians who looked like us,” she recalls. “I could see that there were some discrepancies when it comes to the kind of health care she was provided with — for example, because of her accent there would be some misunderstanding between her and the physicians.”

The faculty is building on breakthroughs made by Black researchers within U of A medicine who excelled against the odds: people like John Akabutu, professor emeritus and founder of the Dr. John Akabutu Centre for Bleeding and Rare Blood Disorders; Tony Fields, a visionary oncologist and advocate for cancer patients at the Cross Cancer Institute who is now chancellor of MacEwan University; Adetola Adesida, a much-decorated professor and innovator in the field of tissue engineering, and others. 

Salami acknowledges there is still much work to do at the U of A to level the playing field for Black scholars. She plans to do more community outreach. This year a working group will incorporate more Black health concepts into the curriculum, and a clinical elective within a Black health setting is in development. She also wants to look at U of A research priorities to ensure that Black health topics are being investigated. 

FoMD is carrying out a workforce census to learn more about how well Canada’s Black and other racialized populations are represented within the faculty. In 2019, 23.6 per cent of respondents to this census indicated they are a visible minority, whereas one in four people in Canada do so, according to Statistics Canada. In a U of A workforce survey conducted in 2019 and updated in 2023, 25.3 per cent of respondents said they identified as a visible minority, up from 22.8 per cent in 2019. And in a 2021 survey of students, 43.1 per cent reported being a member of at least one visible minority group.       

The work of changing systems, educating individuals and overcoming misconceptions can be hard on those who lead it. Eniola Salami still meets high school students who have been told they can’t make it in med school because they are Black. Adesewa Adeleye once had a doctor tell her his own son couldn’t get into medical school because women and Black people like her were getting preferential access. Halimat Ibrahim sometimes feels like she has to work twice as hard just to achieve what others take for granted.

Photo 4: Halimat Ibrahim, President of Black Medical Students Association

Each finds the strength to continue in different ways, but they all say it’s worth it.

“To me, Black excellence is not just about achieving personal success, but using that success to uplift others, break generational cycles and create lasting opportunities for those who follow,” says Ibrahim. “It means sharing our culture, telling our stories, and uplifting the voices of each other. 

“While Black excellence often stands out as extraordinary, my hope is that we can reach a point where Black achievement is so deeply woven into our communities that it’s no longer seen as rare, but as the norm it should be.”