INSIGHT 1: The social mission must be better integrated into medical and health professional education.

Areas of Inquiry and Research Questions

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Inquiry Area 1: Preparing Health Professionals for Holistic and Healing-Centered Practice

Participants underscored that health professionals need comprehensive preparation that extends beyond clinical expertise, and should include social-emotional learning, trauma-informed care, and cultivating cultural humility. They also called for change leadership and systems analysis skills to help professionals innovate and sustain care systems that nourish rather than deplete. 

Roundtable participants emphasized that future healthcare professionals will require more comprehensive support and training than is currently provided to effectively navigate the complexity of their roles. They noted the importance of developing change leadership and systems analysis skills to better equip the workforce to innovate and improve care delivery. Participants also considered conditions and systems are needed to truly nourish physicians and other health professionals and suggested looking to other fields to learn what has succeeded in sustaining their workforce.


Research Questions
  • What types of change leadership education do new generations of leaders need to effectively navigate increasingly complex environments and advocate for innovation and system improvements?
  • What more do we need to learn to ensure the long-term wellbeing of students and early career physicians, given the challenges of caring for communities facing complex health and social issues?
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Inquiry Area 2: Addressing Culture, Identity, and Community Accountability in Health Education

Participants reflected on how medical and professional cultures often separate scholars from their lived experiences, creating distance between education and the realities of the communities they serve. They emphasized the need for a collective “we” mindset and for systems that prioritize accountability to communities over individual prestige. In this context, participants questioned how traditional definitions of expertise might be challenged to make space for different voices and forms of knowledge, and what kinds of systems are needed to truly value and sustain community accountability.

They also explored how leadership training and continuing education could better support social mission fulfillment, including the possibility of mandatory continuing medical education requirements focused on social mission, and how providers can be more effectively trained to understand and serve populations with whom they do not share a common background.

Research Questions
  • Does the “culture” of medical and professional health education separate scholars from their lived experience, and if so, how? What are the consequences for patient care?
  • Who are the stakeholders accountable for the social mission? Whose role is it to address the social mission of medical, research, and graduate health education?
  • How do we measure the impact of social mission-centered education on community health outcomes?
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Inquiry Area 3: Advancing Interdisciplinary and Cross-Disciplinary Education

Participants called for more integrated and innovative educational models that reflect the interconnected nature of health and society. They emphasized that meaningful innovation depends on the ability to work across disciplines, share perspectives, and break down silos between medicine, policy, economics, and community development. As part of these conversations, participants explored how health professions education might become more holistic in addressing the full spectrum of factors that influence health, and how it could evolve to be more innovative in preparing future professionals to collaborate, adapt, and lead in an increasingly complex healthcare landscape.

Research Questions
  • What are the benefits of transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary health education to advance the social mission of education and healthcare?
  • Where are the gaps in interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary health education? How can we fill the gaps?
  • What frameworks reimagine a more interdisciplinary, interdependent curriculum to provide exposure for choice?
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Inquiry Area 4: Building the Foundation for Systemic Change

Participants discussed the importance of examining history and policy to understand how healthcare systems have been constructed and how they might be reimagined to better align with their social mission. They emphasized the need to study incentives, economics, and institutional structures that either enable or inhibit care-centered innovation. In this context, participants raised questions about what executive leadership programs exist for medical and healthcare professionals and what kinds of systems are needed to meaningfully value and support accountability to the communities they serve.

Research Questions
  • What are examples of when people came together to build the foundation of health education?
  • How do we encourage more students to get into health economics (an area of study around policies, and systems)? What incentives work? What “pay-offs” are there?

“We need to challenge how we are getting the outcomes we are, because we already know the system doesn’t work."

- Roundtable participant