Rural areas of Alabama are facing a significant shortage of primary care physicians, according to a press release issued by The University of Alabama. There is an even greater shortage of minority physicians throughout the nation, particularly black males.

In an effort to create a dialogue about these issues, The University of Alabama’s College of Community Health Sciences hosted its first annual African-American Male Health Career Forum at the Ferguson Center Theater Saturday.

The panel was the first of its kind geared specifically for high school students.

Minorities are hugely underrepresented in the health care field, event organizer Pamela Payne-Foster, an associate professor in the department of community and rural medicine, said.

“Only between 6 and 8 percent of medical students in the nation are African-American,” Foster said. “Of that, about 65 percent of the applicants are female, and 35 percent are male.”

Several high schools from the Tuscaloosa area participated in the event, which featured Rani Whitfield as a keynote speaker. Whitfield, also known widely as “Tha Hip Hop Doc,” spoke on his experiences as a young black man making his way through medical school as well as his current practice in Baton Rouge, La. Whitfield is known for his appearances on BET’s “106 and Park,” CNN and PBS.

In 2013, Whitfield released “Get on Tha Bus,” a rap album that addresses current mental and health issues. He also created the comic book series, “Tha Hip Hop Doc Presents: The Legion of Health,” which teaches youths the importance of staying healthy.

Through music and creative writing, Whitfield debates health challenges among the nation’s youth, including peer pressure, drunken driving and prescription drug abuse. Whitfield confronted these challenges during the forum and even performed a brief rap solo during the question-and-answer session. He also addressed the desperate shortage of health professionals in Alabama’s rural areas.

“We’re targeting young African-American men from the communities where they live so they can go back and help the people that took care of them,” Whitfield said.

Attendees also participated in group discussions about “The Pact,” a book written by three black physicians who made a promise to each other to become doctors. Participants also visited “career tables” to learn more about job options in the health care industry.

Alabama needs these types of programs, D’Anthony Jackson, a junior at the University of West Alabama, said. Jackson also mentors high school students through his fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha.

“If we can encourage them to go to medical school, we want that to happen now, instead of waiting later when they have already started their major,” Jackson said.

Marshall Pritchett, another conference speaker, also applauded the program for demonstrating positive role models to the high-schoolers in attendance.

“A lot of African-Americans, especially those in the Black Belt region of Alabama and especially in lower income places, [are] not seeing black physicians in their communities. It all comes down to what you’re exposed to,” Pritchett said.

Pritchett is the only black man in the Rural Medical Scholars program at the University, which encourages medical students to practice in rural areas.

“We’re particularly interested in the Black Belt [and] Central Alabama area,” Foster said. “We’ve got some pipeline programs where we have sort of grown our own doctors. We recruit kids from rural areas. We pipe them into medical school and send them back out into rural areas. We’ve done a very good job of putting them in North Alabama and South Alabama, but not as well in the Black Belt.”

The College of Community Health Sciences will host the forum on an annual basis in order to address these types of issues and pending funding, Foster said.

“The program was pretty fun,” Marcus Martin, a freshman at Paul W. Bryant High School, said. “It was very educational.”