LAUSR

‘Widening participation’ is a wellestablished discourse within the medical education field. Indeed, mirroring the sociodemographic diversity of the broader population is posited as a goal of medical education to an extent unseen in any other discipline. In this issue, Kelly-Blake et al. contribute to this agenda by presenting a scoping review addressing two key areas: the rationales espoused by undergraduate medical schools for increasing under-represented minority (URM) participation and the actual approaches utilised by such institutions. The authors map 137 US articles published between 2000 and 2015. They identify physician–patient concordance and ‘value’ derived by medically underserved populations as the two key rationales, and early interventions to attract and recruit URM students as among the major approaches currently employed to widen participation. The authors conclude that the narrow pipeline to medical education for URM students contracts further as these students move from university in that they are largely expected to provide medical care for URM populations.