Still Wanting Change, Still Working for Justice: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Social Justice Training in Health Service Psychology

Abstract

There has not been a comprehensive analysis of social justice training in all disciplines of health service psychology (HSP) since the special issue of Training and Education in Professional Psychology 10 years ago. This article introduces a special issue titled “Social Justice Training in Health Service Psychology” by reviewing major themes in the literature since the last special issue and noting points of needed attention and scholarship that are both new and continuing since the last special issue. In particular, the authors highlight that training in social justice work is a critical need but that HSP has yet to comprehensively integrate social justice work into its training and practice. The special issue includes eight articles that speak to the role of HSP in addressing this critical societal need and present inspiring and innovative examples of how training can be implemented across the training sequence to improve competency in social justice work. The articles in this issue offer both theoretical and empirically validated examples of integrating social justice into HSP training.