Partners In Health – Caitlyn Bradburn

September 23, 2021September 28, 2021

Why Your Doctor Should Care About Social Justice

It seems we’ve all been thinking deeply about race and racism in the United States. My interest in public health stems from a desire to work towards equity and justice.

One of my favorite TEDTalks is by Mary Bassett: Why Your Doctor Should Care About Social Justice. Dr Bassett is the Health Commissioner for NYC and a long time health activist.

As you may know, I worked for several years at Partners In Health (and am working there on the COVID response now) and so appreciated her nod to the work of Paul Farmer when she says:

“But I knew that epidemics emerge along the fissures of our society, reflecting not only biology, but more importantly patterns of marginalization, exclusion, discrimination related to race, gender, sexuality, class and more. It was true of AIDS. It was true just recently of Ebola. Medical anthropologists such as Paul Farmer, who worked on AIDS in Haiti, call this structural violence: structural because inequities are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world, often in ways that are invisible to those with privilege and power; and violence because its impact — premature deaths, suffering, illness — is violent. We do little for our patients if we fail to recognize these social injustices. Sounding the alarm is the first step towards doing public health right, and it’s how we may rally support to break through and create real change together.”

She ends her talk with this statement:

“Our role as health professionals is not just to treat our patients but to sound the alarm and advocate for change. Rightfully or not, our societal position gives our voices great credibility, and we shouldn’t waste that.”

Videos like this can be great ways to spark ideas among your team members. What if you showed this video to your team and had a conversation about it?

Here are a few questions that may help to spark conversation:

What do you think your individual role is in addressing the social issues that accompany illness?
What do you think our collective role is in addressing the social issues that patients experience?
Have we pushed the envelope far enough as an organization to ensure that we are using our positions of power to advocate for patients and families?

April 19, 2018April 19, 2018

Social Medicine

I am so excited for this year’s Social Medicine Consortium Third Annual Conference, Sharing Strategies for Health Equity. It is going to be held in Gallup and it is not too late to get tickets for next weeks’ events. You can find out more and register here. Folks, Camara Jones will be there! Camara Jones! If you haven’t seen her talk on the Allegory on Race and Racism, it is simply amazing and an even more amazing resource for communicating complex issues around the effects of racism.

What IS social medicine, you may be asking…it is the “belief that inequity kills, and that together we can achieve health equity by constructing systems that demand justice, recognizing our global interconnectedness, and supporting the next generation of health professionals.”

To help you share in my excitement–here is a wonderful talk that Joia Mukherjee, the Medical Director at Partners In Health, gave about a year ago at a Social Medicine Symposium at the University of Minnesota.

Her impassioned talk is a great reminder to “reimagine” the social factors behind health and wellbeing and to examine the social inequality as a risk factor for disease.

Do you have time in the upcoming week in your team meeting to watch her talk with your team? Here are a few discussion questions that might spark an interesting conversation with your team and to push the social-justice-envelope:

How would you define social medicine to a person who is not already aware of what social medicine is and how it impacts health and health care? Joia talks about how she dislikes the term “social determinants of health”–what are your thoughts on the term and on her distaste for it?

How does your work “reimagine social medicine”?

What else might you be able to do, as a team, to ensure that we are considering the social issues that are behind our work?

What structural violence structures are we actively fighting with our work? What structural violence should we consider more actively in our work?

I am very motivated by the social justice elements behind our global health work. At times, of course, the day-to-day tasks of our work can make it harder to give due diligence to our work as advocates and activists and as seekers of social justice….hopefully this gives a nice reminder!

Let’s stand together…