Justice, Law, and Medicine (JLM)

Catalog description: 

Justice, Law and Medicine (JLM) provides students with tools to increase structural competency, a growing field in medical education. It introduces students to structural dimensions of health and health care, with a particular focus on health inequities and health justice.

Most simply, JLM explores structural determinants of health, or the institutional, political, and socioeconomic forces that exert control over the resources a person can or cannot access that impact her health. Specifically, it considers institutional hierarchies, funding structures, laws and policies—and, within them, structural level biases and blind spots—and asks how these phenomena uniquely impact the health of Indigenous and/or rural community members in the Northland; clinical encounters, physician experiences and interprofessional opportunities; and the professional commitments of Medical School faculty.

In so doing, JLM importantly highlights structural interventions that address health inequities, and it engages students in nascent platforms, practices, and agendas that illuminate structural-level disparities and the relationship between race, class, and symptom expression. Taken together, this content facilitates a deeper understanding of clinical and community contexts, and it equips students to respond in necessarily nuanced and multidimensional ways.