Fabiola Arbelo Cruz, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry, has been appointed director of the Yale Psychiatry Residency Program’s Social Justice and Health Equity Curriculum.
The program teaches trainees how to discern and dismantle mental health inequities within current healthcare systems and personal practice. The curriculum includes four tracks spanning the post-graduate years I-IV and includes didactic, experiential, and self-discovery learning.
The four tracks include:
- The Structural Competency Track, which aims to guide trainees in developing an awareness of the extra-clinical structures that impact patients’ lives and health;
- The Human Experience Track, which aims to draw upon sociology and anthropology as rich academic traditions that provide a framework for an examination of the human condition, extending beyond a biomedical lens;
- The Advocacy Track, which aims to expose psychiatry residents to various levels of advocacy, teach psychiatry residents the skills needed to be effective physician advocates, and empower trainees to advocate to improve the health and well-being of their patients;
- The History of Psychiatry Track, which teaches trainees to understand the history of systems and structures in which they live and to cultivate practices and interventions that will promote social justice and health equity.
Arbelo Cruz completed her residency at Boston University Medical Center and a fellowship in addiction psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine.