Program Overview
The certificate in Health Equity is designed to prepare students to become skilled and compassionate healthcare providers, public health professionals, and policy advocates who understand how social determinants shape health status and who are committed to working in solidarity with and to advocating for stigmatized and underserved populations.
Program participants will
- Understand how unjust social conditions cause illness and disease for stigmatized populations
- Be able to identify and intervene in their own practice and with colleagues when bias leads to unequal care
- Learn to practice equity-oriented, person-centered care that helps individuals seeking clinical services feel valued and welcomed
- Learn how policy affects health and how to be an effective advocate for better policies
Our program operates out of four values:
- An asset-based perspective means seeking out and celebrating all of the strengths that health-seekers from underserved communities bring to clinical interactions.
- An equity orientation means that we are always questioning our assumptions and learning to identify our biases.
- A cohort model means that we reject competition in academic work and instead work collaboratively. We are all pulling for each other!
- An anti-racist program does not seek color blindness, but justice.
Program Structure and Curriculum
The Certificate is a one-year program, beginning in August.
- HLEQ 510 – Health Equity and Health Disparities
- HLEQ 515 – Intercultural Communication for Healthcare
- HLEQ 540 – The Politics of Health and Healthcare Policy
- HLEQ 520 – Developing Cultural Humility
We also offer electives:
- HLEQ 525 – Global Health, Local Practice
- HLEQ 530 – Narrative Medicine and Inequality
- HLEQ 545 – Research Methods in Health Disparities
- A variety of 200 and 300-level courses
Costs
Tuition -- $12,500
Financial aid available
Dr. Kendra G. Hotz
Robert R Waller Professor of Population Health
Chair, Health Equity Program
hotzk@rhodes.edu