Embracing Social Engagement in Academic Medicine: Ongoing Challenges and How to Move Forward

Abstract

Academic medical centers have historically been defined by scientific discovery for health advancement. However, the mounting challenges of modern medicine are fueled by the social, economic, and political determinants of health that predict vulnerability and accelerate poor outcomes. To surmount looming threats to health, the academic medical mindset must equally prioritize social engagement—work that directly addresses the systemic social causes of health and illness—alongside the traditional pedagogy of laboratory-based, translational, and clinical research. Considerable barriers still exist, rooted in historical priorities and significant funding structured to reward scientific achievements. Academic medicine has the agency to support elements of restructuring to help prioritize research, education, and training to more prominently include social engagement. Crucial steps to ensure the success of this process include prioritizing financial commitments to community-engaged scholarship and programmatic work and rigorous recognition of faculty who work on socially engaged scholarship within promotion schemes. The COVID pandemic presents an unprecedented opportunity for academic medicine to reflect on the breadth of the work we promote and encourage, work that reflects all the complex elements of health—those that can be documented in a lab notebook and those rooted in social systems and structures that we have neglected for too long.