I’m sometimes amazed at how thoroughly my thinking about health equity has changed since I became part-time co-director of the University of California, Riverside, School of Medicine’s Health Equity, Social Justice, and Anti-Racism curriculum a little more than six years ago in July, 2020.
Throughout several decades prior to that appointment I had given numerous talks and workshops about cultural competence in health care, including at such places as M. D. Anderson in Houston. On my own campus, I had been delivering an annual required cultural competence lecture for first-year medical students, augmented by a smattering of faculty. So when I said yes to the dean’s invitation, I felt reasonably confident, particularly since I was teamed up with one of the school’s clinical professors of pediatrics.