Read more
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 maptoward 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.
List of contents
Structural Competency and Racial Health Disparities: Rethinking Pre-Health Education.- Structural Competence in a Longitudinal Medical School Curriculum in Humanities and Social Sciences.- The Walking Classroom: Social Medicine on the Streets of Baltimore.- "This Ain't No Tool, This Ain't no Kit": Teaching Structural Competency Through An Embodied Pedagogy in The Wake of Narrative Medicine.- Bringing Structural Competency to first-year medical students: a UCSF case study.- Rad Med's Structural Competency Training for Clinicians.- Collaborative Fieldwork on Homelessness, Severe Mental Illness and Incarceration: Cross-Training in Medicine and the Social Sciences.- The NYC Coalition to Dismantle Racism in the Health System: An Action-Oriented Collaboration among the Medical Students, Community-Based Organizations, Public Health Officials, and the Legal Sector in New York City.- Engaging Psychiatry Residents with Communities and with Mental Health Peers.- Beyond Humility: Relational Politics and Lessons from the University of California PRIME - LC program.- Yale Department of Psychiatry Structural Competency Community Initiative (YSCCI).- Community Health Workers as Accelerators of Community Engagement and Structural Competency in Medical Centers.- Teaching Urbanism for Health.- Partnerships for collective recovery in an immigrant/refugee community following massive trauma.- Urban Housing and Asthma - An Example of the Impact of Medical-Legal Partnership in Keeping Children Healthy.- From Punishment to Public Health: Cross-Sector Policy Innovations in Law Enforcement and Mental Health.- From Policy to Partnership: How Allied Healthcare Workers Advance Structural Competency.- Physicians as Policy Advocates: from the bedside to the state house.
About the author
Helena Hansen MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Anthropology,
New York University, NY, NY
Jonathan Metzl, MD, PhD
Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Medicine, Health, and Society
Professor of Psychiatry
Vanderbilt University
300 Calhoun Hall
Nashville, TN
Summary
Each chapter begins with a case study that serves as a springboard for each structural competency
Includes an appendix with curricular materials and evaluation tools used by the top programs
Written by experts with unique backgrounds in both psychiatry and the social sciences
Report
"The book would be a worthwhile addition to any collection on cultural competency; diversity, equity, and inclusion; public health; social determinants of health; or health professions education. Hansen and Metzl's Structural Competency in Mental Health and Medicine: A Case Based Approach to Treating the Social Determinants of Health will, I hope, inspire further development and implementation of structural competency perhaps involving collaborations with health sciences libraries and librarians." (Gregory Laynor, Journal of the Medical Library Association, Vol. 109 (2), April, 2021)
