Main description:

This book documents the ways that clinical practitioners and trainees have used the "structural competency" framework to reduce inequalities in health. The essays describe on-the-ground ways that clinicians, educators, and activists craft structural interventions to enhance health outcomes, student learning, and community organizing around issues of social justice in health and healthcare. Each chapter of the book begins with a case study that illuminates a competency in reorienting clinical and public health practice toward community, institutional and policy level intervention based on alliances with social agencies, community organizations and policy makers. Written by authors who are trained in both clinical and social sciences, the chapters cover pedagogy in classrooms and clinics, community collaboration, innovative health promotion approaches in non-health sectors and in public policies, offering a view of effective care as structural intervention and a road map toward its implementation.

Structural Competency in Mental Health and Medicine is a cutting-edge resource for psychiatrists, primary care physicians, addiction medicine specialists, emergency medicine specialists, nurses, social workers, public health practitioners, and other clinicians working toward equality in health.

Contents:

Introduction

The promise of structural competency and how to promote it

Helena Hansen and Jonathan Metzl

This introduction will describe the concept of structural competency, its motivation, goals, and approach.

Cases of Structural Competency In Action

I: Classroom and in-clinic structural intervention

Jonathan Metzl: Vanderbilt's pre-health curriculum in structural racism

Seth Holmes and Kelly Knight: UCSF/UC Berkeley structural competency curriculum and Rad Med actions

Philippe Bourgois and Joel Braslow: UCLA social medicine program and MD-Ph.D. training in the social sciences

Jeremy Greene: Johns Hopkins curriculum in science and society

Edgar Rivera Colon and Sayantani DasGupta: The Columbia Narrative Medicine Program and narrative humility

II: Community collaborations

Helena Hansen: NYU public psychiatry in residency training

as clinical engagement with communities

Jack Geiger: Community health assessments at Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education

Michael Montoya: Knowing your place structurally: Lessons from The University of California PRIME program.

Sue Estroff: Community members and peers as medical school instructors at UNC

Robert Rohrbaugh: Yale School of Medicine's curriculum in the community

Kamini Doobay: NYC Coalition to Dismantle Racism in the Health System - the product of medical student leadership/White Coats for Black Lives

III: Non-health sectors

Mindy Fullilove: diagnosing and treating racially fractured cities - urban (re)design as health intervention

Jack Saul: collective recovery through community organizations and schools in a time of racial/ethnic trauma

Mallory Curran: Medical-legal partnerships: advocacy with landlords, entitlement programs and in courts

IV: Policy Advocacy

E

rnie Drucker and Gary Belkin: From Punishment to Public Health: multidisciplinary collaborations to divert people from arrest to mental health care

Alethia Jones: Healthcare worker unions as agents of change - the story of 1199

Julie Netherland: Physicians as advocates at the Drug Policy Alliance