Healthcare Workers for Health Justice
WHAT IS THIS PROGRAMME?
A political education co-learning programme designed to develop health practitioners’ analysis and praxis of health justice. Key topics within the programme include, but are not limited to, Indigeneity, disability justice, colonialism, and environmental justice.
This programme draws upon abolitionist principles, recognising that systems of capitalism, colonialism and other forms of oppression are designed to destroy health and exploit life. They cannot be compatible with health justice. Abolition asks us to dismantle and disrupt those systems, and to simultaneously imagine, build and collectively seed systems of care, regeneration and healing.
About the Programme
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This programme is stewarded by 2 junior doctors who are active in the medical organising space. Each programme is a 2 year cycle where a small group of peers share a learning journey. It is centred on healthcare and medical professionals reflecting on questions:
How does the polycrisis affect human health outcomes?
Do we have the knowledges, tools, and cognitive ability to comprehend the phenomena we are facing? Or do we need to build new knowledge pathways
Can justice education for healthcare workers help us create health practices that function within the current context?
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We are experiencing complex and multiple poor health outcomes due to the deliberate and innumerable crises created by extractive economic systems. These crises create more crises as well as amplify current ones. For example, Gaza was already experiencing drought and multiple other ecological challenges due to planetary dysregulation and contamination spearheaded by Israeli occupation(source). Now, the Peoples of Gaza have to contend with ecocide alongside their genocide, which is creating a transgenerational polycrisis. Simultaneously, the Peoples of Gaza now have to confront these deliberate and multiple crises with an ever debilitating infrastructure, including the death of doctors, engineers, scientists, liberators, and so on.
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The programme co-hosts are working with the individual peers helping them reflect on their learnings and methods to embed them into their daily practices.
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We are currently looking for partners to scale up the method of working with healthcare professionals in specific geographic regions.
LATEST OUTPUT
A Health Declaration
During the summer of 2024, psychologists, doctors, medical students, and other healthcare professionals from racialised experiences gathered to co-create methods for weaving justice into their practices. This is their Declaration and proposition for a world that rooted in healing rather than harm. As you read, you become part of the Declaration.
What Participants Are Saying
“It feels like I have so much more language to describe things. It has informed my politics and campaigning further and pushed me to think about alternative healing infrastructures more often. It has radically influenced my teaching. Personally, the course has given me the space to slow down and to imagine when maybe I was very busy with doing - this has been really helpful. I’ve seen the power of gentleness and care in spaces like these first-hand and continue to take this forward in my life/practice.”
“I think it has given me a newfound confidence in my knowledge and ability to advocate for my patients and my community which I will take forward in my clinical work, particularly when I can see that my patients are suffering from mental ill health because of wider socio-policito-cultural-environmental factors.”
Programme Outputs
A selection of works from this area of work.
If you want to read more, go to the Research Library.
Partner With Us
We work ecosystemically. We recognise that the pathway to the abolition of systems that create health injustices cannot be done alone. We always welcome approaches for partnerships with like-minded organisations to help drive our collective missions forward.
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