Structural Competency

 Recommended Resources

Videos

How structural racism is magnifying the public health crisis

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Dr. Camara Jones shares four allegories on “race” and racism. She hopes that these "telling stories" empower you to do something different, and that you will remember them and pass them on.

Interview with David Williams, MPH, PhD: Structural Competency and Institutional Discrimination

Dr. Lynn Todman, Executive Director of Population Health and Community Health & Wellness at Lakeland Health, interviews Dr. David Williams about the differences between institutional and individual discrimination, and how organizations can address the biases that lead to health inequities.

Articles

Structural competency: curriculum for medical students, residents, and interprofessional teams on the structural factors that produce health disparities

Research on disparities in health and health care has demonstrated that social, economic, and political factors are key drivers of poor health outcomes.

Structural Vulnerability and Health: Latino Migrant Laborers in the United States

This paper includes a series of ethnographic analyses of the processes that render undocumented Latino immigrants structurally vulnerable to ill health, and hopes to extend the social science concept of “structural vulnerability” to make it a useful concept for health care.

Structural competency: Theorizing a new medical engagement with stigma and inequality

This paper describes a shift in medical education away from approaches that emphasize cross-cultural understandings of individual patients, toward attention to forces that influence health outcomes at levels above individual interactions. It reviews existing structural approaches to stigma and health inequalities developed outside of medicine, and proposes changes to U.S. medical education that will infuse clinical training with a structural focus.