Abstract: 

Medical schools foster indoctrination into the medical industrial complex, which must be disrupted to provide equitable, structurally competent healthcare. In 2020 we - a collective of medical student activists at UCLA - successfully attained the creation of a “Structural Racism and Health Equity” Curricular Theme (SRHE) after years of student and community organizing. SRHE is a mandatory component of UCLA’s medical education led by two faculty physicians and 21 paid student-workers who conspired together to create a four-year place-based curriculum that fosters students’ critical consciousness and radical imagination. Over the last 3 years, our team has spent over 2,000 hours collectively developing didactics, small group activities, and reflective workshops for over 30+ hours of dedicated pre-clinical curricular material. 

Our SRHE curriculum strives to use a historical focus to cover topics and critiques of racial capitalism, the medical industrial complex, and abolitionist interventions - with the hope of cultivating a community of politicized medical students with a radical imagination of what healthcare can be. SRHE intentionally centers non-medicalized knowledge and experiences by bringing LA-based community organizers into class sessions. We create spaces for students to engage with ongoing campaigns and efforts around structural competency including: 

abolition, housing justice, labor organizing, environmental racism, policing and carcerality, settler colonialism, Indigenous health, global health decolonial theory, disability justice, gender, sexuality & queer health justice, fatphobia and food justice. 

The aims of this project are: 1) to develop the capacity of medical training to move beyond social determinants, train structural competency and critically challenge the physician’s role in upholding systems of power, 2) engage with place and space-based politics in the greater Los Angeles area (unceded Tongva land) and the histories of resistance within medicine with the goals of imagining and co-creating an intersectional, inclusive, and justice-oriented future invested in the health and liberation of all.