Social justice in integrated care: educational preparation for healthcare professionals

Social Justice in integrated care - Educational preparation for healthcare professionals An integral part of any integrated health and care system, is the appropriate educational preparation and support of the healthcare practitioners and leaders working within that system. While a biomedical education provides a basis for some aspects of healthcare delivery, it in itself will fail to address social and political determinants of health. In order to address issues of social inequality and injustice within healthcare, an interdisciplinary module was developed for undergraduate healthcare professional students. Rather than focusing on any one aspect of social exclusion, the ‘Challenging Injustices in Healthcare’ module used an Intersectional Social Justice approach, to facilitate students in engaging in critical reflection on broad issues of injustice; and how these may impact health and well-being from a global perspective. Cross-cutting themes of poverty, racism, gender inequality, ableism, homophobia amongst others were explored through engagement with peer reviewed scholarship, first person testimonial, arts, literature and multimedia. The proposed presentation will outline the theoretical underpinnings and concepts explored through this module as well as discuss considerations for the delivery of such education within formal or informal settings. The module itself utilised an enquiry-based learning approach with principals of Universal Design for Learning integrated throughout to ensure social justice in learning as well as social justice as learning (Gilmore et al 2022).