Christen Johnson, a 2023 graduate of the EdD in Educational & Professional Practice, has written and published a dissertation titled The Monroe Method: A Methodology on Navigating Race, Oppression, and Equity in Medical Education through Physician Cultural Responsibility.
With the barriers healthcare physicians face, wellness and burnout are common traits, which can complicate the overall practice of medicine. Physician Cultural Responsibility allows physicians to overcome health disparities and can support physicians while embracing the intersectionality of the populations they serve. Incorporation of Physician Cultural Responsibility into a physician’s professional identity is essential for the practice to be life-long.
As there is no standardized curriculum to teach the practice of Physician Cultural Responsibility, Johnson’s study aims to evaluate a proposed curriculum for adopting Physician Cultural Responsibility into student physician professional identity, student experience, and knowledge transfer. Through the transformative research paradigm and transformative learning theory, a mixed-methods study of deidentified qualitative and quantitative data was performed using analytical software.
Johnson’s proposed curriculum offers best practices for a methodology that addresses the inequities of practice in cultural competency requirements within medical education. This includes inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogy aimed at supporting the students’ development of skills that improve the patient-physician connection with all patients, limit the impact of personal biases on medical practice, and dismantle the social categorization of medicine. The practice of Physician Cultural Responsibility and its adoption in physician professional identity yields an opportunity to create the culture change necessary within medicine to improve equitable patient-centered care for all patients, overcome health disparities, and support physicians through the challenges of medical practice.
A champion for health equity, scholar-practitioner, and board-certified family physician, Johnson’s clinical practice in family medicine is rooted in equitable practice, lifestyle medicine, and seeking system interventions that bring healing to patients, their families, and communities. Her research interests include health disparities, medical education, and antiracist medicine, and have facilitated numerous local, regional, and national research presentations, and publications in peer-reviewed journals, textbooks, and grants.
Read and download Johnson’s dissertation, The Monroe Method: A Methodology on Navigating Race, Oppression, and Equity in Medical Education through Physician Cultural Responsibility.
