The Structural Competency Working Group: Lessons from Iterative, Interdisciplinary Development of a Structural Competency Training Module

In the United States and around the world, social, political, and economic structures are hugely determinant of the distribution of illness and health. Structural competency is a promising framework to help clinicians recognize, analyze, ameliorate, and hopefully alter these harmful inequities. To bring this framework to health professionals, the Structural Competency Working Group has developed, operationalized, evaluated, and revised a three hour structural competency training. Encouraging “impractical” innovative thinking, striving to make content “sticky,” and responding to findings from evaluation, the SCWG developed a brief training that we have found to be surprisingly impactful. Our efforts to implement and evaluate this training for a variety of healthcare professions suggest that it can be similarly relevant across a range of fields.We hope our case will inspire others to implement similar trainings in other geographical locations and for professionals in other fields, within and beyond healthcare.