Systemic injustices cause vast inequities in health and health care outcomes. Medical education has the potential to support trainees to develop as agents of social change but United States residency programmes rarely deliver social medicine and advocacy curricula.The impact of such curricula on learners is not well understood.
| WHAT WA S TRIED?At Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), a Harvard affiliated internal medicine training programme, we developed a novel, required social medicine and advocacy curriculum. The course has been previously described. 1 Residents receive over 100 hours of small group discussions, field trips, workshops, and experiential learning through a research-based advocacy project. We interviewed 15 current residents and alumni who took our course to evaluate perceptions of its quality and impact. We used a Framework approach to analyse the qualitative data.
| WHAT LE SSON S WERE LE ARNED?Participants consistently stated that the advocacy curriculum helped them to reconnect with the values that prompted them to pursue medicine. One participant said: 'I feel like the impact of the curriculum of the advocacy course is in taking the spark that people come in with, and teaching them how to light a fire … it is trying to figure out how to not just keep (empathy and connection to values) alive, but actually help it blossom.' Many course participants found the advocacy curriculum to be protective against burnout. For example, one person stated:'I think one of the ways to address (depression/burnout during residency training) is to have meaning and purpose. And the advocacy course really brought a lot of that in connection with the initial values that brought you into medicine, and building you as a physician with the skills to act on those values. So, I think it provided a lot of meaning and probably protection against depression and burnout.'Participants consistently noted that the course increased self-efficacy, a sense they had the power to make positive change. A participant reflected: 'There were many times, given the resources that we had, given our patient population (is) largely uninsured, it was very easy to have the feeling of hopelessness … You know that even though you give patients these medicines, these medicines couldn't begin to fix their situation. I came to learn … health depends so much on your social environment, your relationships, and all these other fundamental structures that are beyond what is traditionally seen in the purview of healthcare … Because of the course, I felt much more empowered in how we could affect change … I think it really changed how I saw myself as a physician into the future.'In conclusion, rather than being inspired and capable of addressing the profound systemic factors that prevent the attainment of health equity, much of the nation's health care workforce is dispirited, disengaged and disconnected from this important task and from one another.Reflections from course participants on our social medicine and advocacy course challenge us to further inve...