Social Medicine Immersion Month

"Orientation Month” was started in 1983 as a way of introducing interns to life in the Bronx and to the principles of social medicine. It is a unique experience in our residency education that will challenge our residents to grow personally and professionally, form deeper connections with co-residents from the other tracks, and revisit the values that led residents to a social medicine residency in the first place.

The course seeks to:

• Deliberately center the voices of those directly affected by the various systems of oppression that inhibit our ability to live our best lives

• Highlight community self-determination as a means to prepare our trainees to be effective at connecting their future patients to resources and taking part in community-led initiatives for structural reform both inside and outside the healthcare industrial complex.

Goals of the month:

• To provide trainees with a theoretical foundation to understand illness through frameworks of power and systems of oppression that will serve to inform future action in using medicine as a means to social justice

• To promote trainees' transition from the patient-provider centered clinical level to a community-wide, community-led framework of conceptualizing health promotion/disease prevention in the Bronx

• To sensitize trainees to their own identities and personally held biases within the process of providing care

• To develop structural competency and critical consciousness through the orientation of socio-political and historical factors that contribute to contemporary community-level health issues for oppressed populations