For Race Equality Week (3 - 9 February 2025) Phoenix Guwa, a Medical Graduate from Oxford and now a Foundation Doctor in London, shares a personal reflection on breaking barriers in medicine.
By Phoenix Guwa
Phoenix Guwa, a Medical graduate from the University of Oxford and now a Foundation Doctor in London, reflects on his journey into medicine—a path shaped by resilience and a commitment to challenging inequality. Growing up, he questioned whether a medical career was possible, but access initiatives and relatable role models helped shift his perspective. However, medical school brought new challenges, as he was one of only six Black students in his cohort, often feeling out of place due to a lack of diversity among peers, lecturers, and the curriculum.
Beyond personal struggles, Phoenix highlights how these systemic inequalities impact patient care, from underrepresentation of medical conditions on darker skin to broader healthcare disparities. Despite these obstacles, he remains hopeful and driven, drawing strength from mentors and organisations like Melanin Medics. Through advocacy and mentorship, he actively works to make medicine more inclusive, sharing his experiences with medical students and inspiring the next generation of doctors. Now, he is determined to help create a future where aspiring doctors from all backgrounds feel they belong and where healthcare truly serves everyone.
At the age of 17, it was hard for me to conceive that a career in medicine was possible. I saw such roles as being exclusively for the elite and privileged in society, a category that I definitely didn’t fit into! Access initiatives in the sixth form made the transition to medical school seem less daunting, allowing the hope of a possible future in medicine to materialise. Meeting inspirational current students at the time who shared similar backgrounds to me, showed me that perhaps there was a place for people like me in the medical field, allowing me to reject all of the stereotypes and doubts that I had internalised. Seven years later, I’m writing this blog as a Foundation Doctor incredibly appreciative of the position I now find myself in. And whilst I’m eternally grateful for my medical education, my path to qualifying, has not been without its challenges.
Being one of the 6 black medical students in my cohort was hard. My year group, although filled to the brim with the most intelligent, interesting, and kind-hearted individuals who I have no doubt will one day change the world, lacked diversity. The select group of Lecturers, Tutors, and Doctors who were responsible for delivering our teaching, world-renowned, supportive, and excellent professionals, lacked diversity. Even the curriculum itself, incredibly thorough though it was (feeling maybe too thorough at times), lacked diversity. Everything about the infrastructure that surrounded my medical school experience made me feel like I did not belong or that I wasn’t good enough.
At times it felt impossible to escape that same self-doubt I had worked so hard to get over before applying to the University of Oxford. It felt like the implicit challenges wore away at me constantly – one of the most persistent being my struggle to relate to role models in the hospital or amongst the medical teaching staff, as their backgrounds felt worlds apart from mine. I was worried that setting my aspirations too high would only lead to disappointment, with differential attainment acting as a ceiling on my potential and limiting what I could realistically achieve. The more explicit incidents, however, felt like a finishing blow. One moment that has always stuck with me happened in my second year when I visited a friend at his college. The porters let me through without issue, but before I could enter the main quad, a student stopped me at the gate and demanded to see my Student Card, a request I didn’t see him making to the other students not belonging to college who coincidentally entered with me at the same time. While I can laugh about it now, at the time it was pretty disheartening and was a stark reminder of how out of place I sometimes felt.
The greatest challenge I faced was not just the systemic barriers that shaped my medical school experience or those that may continue throughout my career. What troubled me most was how these barriers reinforced racism as a social determinant of health for my patients. With disproportionate rates of poverty in racially-minoritised groups, poorer health outcomes, poorer healthcare provision, and poorer health-seeking behaviours, race can be a matter of life and death. Although the proportion of minority ethnic groups that make up the total UK population has rapidly increased, the legacy of bias and discrimination that has seeped into clinical practice persists to be difficult to address. Unfortunately, medical school curricula don’t adequately reflect this. I’ve had eczema for years but even as a medical student I wouldn’t have been able to diagnose it on my own body but I could have told you exactly how it would have presented on lighter skin. Tackling these gaps in medical education is something that I feel passionate about. In particular, working directly with marginalised communities to identify directly what their unique care needs are and where they feel our healthcare systems are falling short and eventually implementing this into teaching.
Despite some of the few negative experiences, I remain incredibly hopeful for the future. I’ve leaned on my friends, family, and mentors from organisations such as Melanin Medics who support aspiring and practicing Black doctors, to navigate these challenges, and their unwavering support has helped me find strength in moments of doubt. They reminded me that I belong here just as much as anyone else and that my experiences will ultimately shape me into a more empathetic and driven doctor. The landscape of medicine is changing (albeit rather slowly), and I am determined to be part of that progress—ensuring that future students and clinicians from all backgrounds feel seen, heard, and empowered to reach their full potential, as well as ensuring that we develop a workforce of healthcare professionals who are more responsive and sensitive to the needs of all patients, not the select few.