-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Kathleen Gorman-Ezell, Anjel Stough-Hunter, The Need for Adoption of a Structural Competency Framework in Social Work Education, Health & Social Work, Volume 50, Issue 2, May 2025, Pages 153–156, https://doi.org/10.1093/hsw/hlaf009
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Social determinants of health (SDH) are now embedded in the education of healthcare providers, part of the assessment process across most healthcare organizations, and a metric used in the tracking of population health outcomes. Physicians and allied health professionals are trained to listen to individual stories and generate individual-level solutions (Metzl, 2012). In contrast, social workers are charged with assessing and intervening at multiple levels to benefit not just the individual but also the larger infrastructure and society. Thus, clinical medical social workers are often seen as the way to address SDH within healthcare organizations (Craig et al., 2013). However, the effectiveness of clinical medical social workers is dependent on their ability to work within an interdisciplinary team that has a shared language and understanding of SDH. Addressing SDH at the individual level is only a part of the solution as more macro-level issues (such as racism, gender discrimination, and social exclusion) are often missed, even by clinical medical social workers (Craig et al., 2013; Sharma et al., 2018). Structural competency training for clinical medical social workers, as well as other healthcare providers, offers a shared language, as well as a deeper and broader understanding of the impact of social structures on the lives of patients. Structural competency also provides the necessary tools for confronting these structures at the micro, mezzo, and macro level. This Viewpoint column demonstrates the need for better integration of structural competency training in social work education.
