“Structural Competency: New Medicine for Institutional Inequalities that Make Us Sick”

April 12, 2013

University of California, San Francisco

This one-day working conference will assemble multidisciplinary practitioners and theorists to explore a new paradigm, Structural Competency, that proposes that a host of clinical disorders (e.g., hypertension, obesity, smoking, medication ‘non-compliance,’ post-traumatic syndromes, depression, psychosis) must be addressed as the downstream implications of upstream decisions (e.g., food delivery systems, housing discrimination, urban infrastructure failure, biocapitalism, diagnostic codes).

Structural competency extends beyond cultural competency to adress the pathologies of institutions and policies that alter behaviors and biologies of individuals.

This event is sponsored by: National Conference for Physician-Scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities