Citation

Sharma M, Pinto AD, Kumagai AK. Acad. Med. 2018; 93(1): 25-30.

Affiliation

M. Sharma is an infectious diseases physician and Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Canadian HIV Trials Network (CTN)/Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research (CANFAR) postdoctoral fellow, St. Michael's Hospital, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. A.D. Pinto is a family physician and public health specialist, Department of Family and Community Medicine, St. Michael's Hospital, assistant professor, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, clinician-scientist, Centre for Urban Health Solutions, Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, St. Michael's Hospital, and director, The Upstream Lab, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. A.K. Kumagai is endocrinologist, professor, and vice chair of education, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, and F.M. Hill Chair in Humanism Education, Women's College Hospital, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Association of American Medical Colleges, Publisher Lippincott Williams and Wilkins)

DOI

10.1097/ACM.0000000000001689

PMID

28445214

Abstract

Medical schools are increasingly called to include social responsibility in their mandates. As such, they are focusing their attention on the social determinants of health (SDOH) as key drivers in the health of the patients and communities they serve. However, underlying this emphasis on SDOH is the assumption that teaching medical students about SDOH will lead future physicians to take action to help achieve health equity. There is little evidence to support this belief. In many ways, the current approach to SDOH within medical education positions the SDOH as "facts to be known" rather than as "conditions to be challenged and changed." Educators talk about poverty but not oppression, race but not racism, sex but not sexism, and homosexuality but not homophobia. The current approach to SDOH may constrain or even incapacitate the ability of medical education to achieve the very goals it lauds, and in fact perpetuate inequity. In this article, the authors explore how "critical consciousness" and a recentering of the SDOH around justice and inequity can be used to deepen our collective understanding of power, privilege, and the inequities embedded in social relationships in order to foster an active commitment to social justice among medical trainees. Rather than calling for minor curricular modifications, the authors argue that major structural and cultural transformations within medical education need to occur to make educational institutions truly socially responsible.

Language: en