Social Justice and Public Health: A Framework for Curriculum Reform

As public health aims to improve health outcomes of all populations, social justice is argued to be the philosophy on which public health is based. A social justice approach to population health requires the field to recognize that the inequities in society have negative consequences for health. The purpose of this work is to develop a framework for integrating social justice into a public health curriculum. We used an interprofessional approach to create a definition of social justice, and develop a training program and evaluation plan. The program weaves social justice throughout the core MPH curriculum. The social justice definition is the foundation of the curriculum which is composed of eight key social justice domains with competencies directly aligned with each of the domains. Our evaluation plan focuses on students’ change in understanding of social justice in public health. The overarching goal is to explicitly integrate social justice into an MPH curriculum such that students can work toward health equity and justice in their careers.