Focused on the needs of underserved populations, the LEARN project aims to create an integrated academic multicultural health and cultural competence program in the arenas of education, research, and linkages to community-based organizations.

Useful Resource
Addressing Health Disparities and Promoting Diversity: A Catalogue of Programs and Resources at UCSF School of Medicine

MS1 - MS4 Curriculum

LEARN supports the work of health services and medical education researchers, providing a context in which they collaborate to create and revise medical school curriculum on health and health care disparities.

Health Disparities Working Group (HDWG)
Program in Medical Education for the Urban Underserved (PRIME-US)
Student Curriculum Electives and Projects
Caring for the Underserved
Health Disparities Nootime Lecture Series
Health & Human Rights Elective
Clínica Martín-Baró

Health Disparities Working Group (HDWG)

HDWG is a valuable resource for curriculum development at the School of Medicine. Under the Multicultural LEARN administrative umbrella and with AME Curricular Innovations funding, HDWG has achieved numerous successes, ranging from the incorporation of disparities material into current SOM sessions to dissemination of the HDWG model to schools nationwide.

Program in Medical Education for the Urban Underserved (PRIME-US)

PRIME-US is a special track providing a medical education experience concentrating on care of urban underserved populations.

Student Curriculum Electives and Projects

LEARN-supported faculty worked with student curriculum developers to design electives and other projects related to health and health care disparities to supplement the core medical school curriculum. These examples can serve as models for similar projects in the coming years.

Caring For the Underserved

In an era of molecular medicine, it has become possible to contain many of the genetic and biologic etiologies of disease. In contrast, much less success has been achieved in containing the social causes of disease. A disproportionate burden of disease continues to befall the most vulnerable members of society: the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants and the elderly. This class will deal with the strategies employed by publicly funded community clinic physicians and nurses, community based organizations and social justice advocates to achieve equity in health for underserved communities. This class will also afford students the opportunity to interact and learn from the perspective of the community. Overall, this class will give students a unique look into the diverse world of the medically underserved.

Health Disparities Noontime Lecture Series

A lecture series on disparities that complements the medical school core curriculum was developed using feedback from student interest surveys.

Objectives:

• The Lecture Series will serve as a student-led, student-run forum to address disparities in health and healthcare through collaborations with UCSF faculty and Bay Area community leaders.
• The Series will be open to the entire UCSF community.
• The Series will run throughout all blocks of the UCSF SOM essential core curriculum
• The Series will address significant topics not currently discussed in the core medical curriculum in order to provide UCSF medical students, in particular, a firmer understanding of inequities in health and healthcare.
• The Series will make efforts to expose UCSF students to faculty whose research focuses on health and healthcare disparities.
• With the recent implementation of UCSF’s pilot PRIME program for improving care of underserved patient populations, the Lecture Series will support the learning goals of students in this program.

Health & Human Rights Elective

In the fall of 2006, the elective Health and Human Rights was offered to all UCSF students. The goals of the elective were to:

1. Introduce a dialogue of health and human rights on UCSF campus;
2. Provide a framework for health and human rights discussion through presentations of specific topics;
3. Showcase UCSF student organizations and individuals who are active in human rights work;
4. Provide examples of students, faculty, and others who are working in the field of health and human rights; and
5. Provide students with mentors for career advice and potential research projects which relate to health and human rights

Clínica Martín-Baró

The Clínica is a collaboration between UCSF graduate and SFSU undergraduate students and faculty and community physicians. The Clínica's mission is to provide access to free and linguistically accommodating health care to the medically underserved and economically disadvantaged Spanish-speaking community of the Mission district of San Francisco. Through a medical and undergraduate student-run clinic, we aim to also provide an educational environment that facilitates clinical and community outreach experiences to those who seek to provide health care to the underserved.