One Health

Structural competency calls for a new approach to the relationships among race, class, and symptom expression. It bridges research on social determinants of health to clinical interventions, and prepares clinical trainees to act on systemic causes of health inequalities. While many health care professionals, such as social workers and public health practitioners, have long addressed structural determinants of health, clinical care has been focused on the individual, and often restricts the scope of cultural competency training to the beliefs and behaviors of individual patients. Structural competency aims to develop a language and set of interventions to reduce health inequalities at the level of neighborhoods, institutions and policies. For more information, click here.