“A New Way to Fight Health Disparities?”
“Even if cultural competency training wasn’t reinforcing racial stereotypes, after decades of integration into medical school curricula, there is little evidence that it is effectively addressing the issues it was created to solve. As an alternative, Hansen and Metzl are proposing that medical students train in structural competency instead. At its core, this training would be a crash course in the social determinants of health, an area that Hansen says has historically been seen as the domain of public health, not medicine. But she and Metzl are out to change that, and Hansen thinks the increased focus on holding providers (and insurance companies) responsible for the outcomes of their patients may help to push this effort along.”
http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/07/a_new_way_to_fight_health_disparities.html
Teaching about structures instead of teaching about cultures – I kind of like this. If we’d done this in Elementary School, instead of our parents and teachers thinking that they could make us into a hate-free generation by feeding us cookies from other countries, they would have thought to teach us how to recognize and diminish systems of hatred by understanding social structures and the millenials wouldn’t be nearly so good at cultural appropriation/totally and genuinely terrifyingly convinced that racism isn’t a thing.
(credit to SR)
