Motivation to Teach Social Action:
I am a physician-social scientist who studies medical student socialization around health equity. My dissertation explores how medical education does or does not empower medical students to incorporate addressing the social and structural determinants of health into their clinical purview. I recently published an article titled "They're training us to be helpless," attending to the ways that medical education does not empower medical student with the tools to engage in social justice efforts, despite curricular interventions towards that aim. I am currently a psychiatry resident at UCLA on the research track with provides me with 50% research time that enables me to develop and teach coursework around the social determinants of health and research those interventions. Teaching Social Action is the perfect springboard for my commitment to cultivating a career that bends medical education towards health justice.
Course Description:
Health Equity and Social Action in Graduate Medical Education is a longitudinal, interdisciplinary course designed for residents and fellows seeking to integrate structural analysis and social action into their clinical practice. Drawing on the principles of structural competency, co-developed by Chair of Psychiatry, Helena Hansen, the course provides a critical examination of how sociopolitical forces manifest in hospital systems, clinical encounters, and the everyday realities of medical training.
Drawing from public health, sociology, anthropology, and implementation science, the curriculum centers on four pillars:
- Structural Foundations: Understanding structural determinants of health, including racism, power, and policy.
- Clinical Application: Identifying structural drivers in patient care, workflow, and team dynamics; practicing structural humility
- Professional Identity Formation: Examining how hierarchy and the hidden curriculum shape professional norms around social justice and social action
- Action & Implementation: Designing, piloting, and evaluating a small-scale equity-focused intervention within one's clinical setting or learning environment.
The course uses interactive seminars, community partnerships, reflective writing, clinical ethnography, and small-group facilitated dialogue to cultivate critical consciousness and collaborative leadership. Learners practice real-time strategies for addressing inequities through the experiential social action course model.
By the end, learners will leave with actionable tools, strengthened professional identities rooted in social justice, and a concrete project capable of advancing equity at the patient, team, or system level.
Taught By:
Hannah Connolly, MD, PhD, MPH
Resident Physician
Psychiatry
UCLA, David Geffen School of Medicine
Read profile here.