Opinion: Med students, physicians need social mission education now more than ever
A longstanding failure of the U.S. health care system is that minority and vulnerable populations experience poorer health outcomes and higher death rates. The Covid-19 pandemic and other public health emergencies extend and deepen this failure.
Some see this as a symptom that the country needs more health professionals, especially in the context of looming shortages of primary care and other clinicians. But just adding more clinicians won’t solve this vexing issue. What we need is a health care workforce that has been trained to not only understand that social determinants — things like access to healthy food, a safe place to live, access to health services, and the like — have important effects on health but are able to respond to them.
