From Concept to Competency: Teaching Health Equity Competencies Across U.S. Health Professions Curricula

The health professions program you are in should not determine what you learn about health equity. Since health equity is not discipline specific, we believe that there should be a standardized set of health equity competencies shared across all health professions programs. To advance this aim, we assembled a team of co-investigators across six health professions programs to update and streamline how health equity is assessed and taught. This required us to collect baseline student data on a wide range of health equity competencies to determine the gaps. Doing so allowed us to identify two main recommendations for curricula reform: (a) faculty must understand and articulate health equity as a science-informed and justice-based lens that cuts across disciplines; and (b) faculty must rely on a critical pedagogy that names structural inequities to prepare learners to address such threats to population health in real time. In this paper, we explain how the findings from our baseline study on student health equity knowledge, attitudes, and capacity informed our competency-based curriculum recommendations. We believe these recommendations are particularly timely given the U.S. geopolitical moment that condemns discussions of power imbalances and systemic oppression as the root of unfair health outcomes. It is our hope that this critique will aid faculty who maintain their values for health equity amidst dwindling institutional support.