What is Structural Competency?
Structural competency is the capacity for health professionals to recognize and respond to health and illness as the downstream effects of broad social, political, and economic structures.
This site is dedicated to sharing training materials developed by the Structural Competency Working Group. For more on the definition of structural competency and related resources, please visit structuralcompetency.org.
What is the Structural Competency Working Group?
The Structural Competency Working Group is comprised of healthcare workers, scholars, public health professionals, students, educators, and other community members. Founded in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2014, our goal is to help promote the training of health professionals in structural competency around the country and beyond. Toward this end, we develop and disseminate open-use structural competency curricula.
We offer a half-day structural competency training that has been implemented dozens of times with diverse health profession audiences, including students and practitioners of medicine, nursing, social work, and public health among other professions. We are currently developing adaptations of the training tailored for specific audiences, including reproductive health and mental health professionals and trainees, RNs and nursing students, and pre-health students.
To learn more about our group, please read this chapter from Structural Competency in Mental Health and Medicine. A special thank you to the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues and Berkeley Center for Social Medicine for their ongoing support and contributions.
To read about an early version of our training, please see our article in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, “Teaching Structure: A Qualitative Evaluation of a Structural Competency Training for Resident Physicians.”