The certificate in Health Equity is designed to prepare students to become skilled and compassionate healthcare providers, public health professionals, and policy advocates who understand how social, clinical, and policy forces shape health status. Students work in community and clinical placements in order to connect academic concepts to lived experience and to gain practical skills in recognizing and mitigating the pathways that produce disparities. 

Program participants will

• Understand how unjust social conditions cause illness and disease for stigmatized populations
• Be able to identify and intervene in their own practice and with colleagues when bias leads to unequal care
• Learn to practice equity-oriented, person-centered care that helps individuals seeking clinical services feel valued and welcomed
• Learn how policy affects health and how to be an effective advocate for better policies

A total of sixteen (16) credits as follows:

1. HLEQ 510 or HLEQ 410 Health Equity and Disparities
2. HLEQ 515 or HLEQ 415 Intercultural Communication for Health and Healthcare
3. One of the following: HLEQ 520 or HLEQ 420 Developing Cultural Humility, HLEQ 530 Health Humanities and Social Inequality, HLEQ 430 Narrative Medicine and Inequality
4. HLEQ 540 or HLEQ 440 Politics of Health and Healthcare Policy
5. The program chair may approve substitutions, including the following:
   1. HLEQ 445 Research Methods in Health Disparities
   2. HLEQ 435 Global Health Local Practice
   3. HLEQ 325 Healthcare Ethics and Social Inequality
   4. HLEQ 210 Introduction to Health Equity
   5. PHIL 322 Medical Ethics
   6. PSYC 220 Psychology of Health
   7. ANSO 347 Medical Sociology
   8. AFS 350 Race Thinking and Health Disparities
   9. URBN 340 Justice in the City
   10. URBN 460 Internship
   11. URBN 451 Research Practicum
   12. URBN 452 Research Practicum