Early outreach: career awareness for health professions

"Early outreach" may be defined as a long-term, talent-development strategy designed to prepare a well qualified pool of disadvantaged and underrepresented minority applicants for entry into health professions schools, particularly medical schools. The concept of early outreach is to prepare, motivate, and educate talented, economically disadvantaged junior high or secondary school students to gain the necessary academic qualifications to make high school graduation, college attendance, and health careers a reality. In this paper the author defines the problem to which early outreach is addressed and discussed the contextual and historical background of the concept. A number of programs at the Health Sciences Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago designed and implemented to provide a model to achieve the concept of early outreach are described.