Medical Education

Curriculum
Social Context of Clinical Decisions (SCCD)

The Social Context of Clinical Decisions is a modular course that extends over two semesters and is based mostly in small group discussions. It is based on the premise that there are powerful social forces (economic, technological, political, organizational, managerial) that shape the practice of medicine and, sometimes, threaten the moral integrity of physicians, such as pressures for cost containment.

The primary goal of the course is to provide students with the intellectual knowledge (medical ethics, health care economics and politics, the structure of managed care, epidemiology) needed to understand those social forces so that they can work with their medical peers in the future to shape social policies that are more just and caring, and health care delivery systems that are more supportive of virtuous, patient-centered medical practice.