Key Takeaways
- Medical schools will no longer be required to teach about common health inequities
- The change follows increasing political pressure regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion
- Experts warn that removing these topics from the curriculum could impact patient care
The Shift in Medical Education Standards
On Monday, March 30, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Future doctors may no longer be required to learn about how social and economic factors influence health. A major U.S. accreditation group, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), has removed language from its standards that previously urged medical schools to teach about health inequities.
This change affects the standards for the 2027-2028 academic year. Earlier guidelines required students to learn about “the importance of health care disparities and health inequities,” and how they affect different groups. The updated standards now focus more broadly on “skills of self-directed learning, including the ability to self-identify critical gaps in knowledge or understanding and to find, analyze, synthesize and appraise the credibility of relevant information to fill those gaps.”
Previously, schools were encouraged to teach “structural competency,” which involves understanding how factors outside medicine—such as housing, food access, and transportation—can shape a patient’s health. Dr. Stella Safo, a physician and founder of Just Equity for Health, described this as a way to ask: Do you know the social, political realities affecting your patient’s health?
“It’s not like a natural part of medicine, although it should be,” she told STAT News. “So the active removal of it from the curriculum is something that is concerning. I think it speaks to this larger place that we’re in of the anti-woke, anti-diversity, equity and inclusion movement that’s unfortunately affecting all of us, because teaching structural competency is helpful for your doctors if you’re white, you’re Black, you’re a man, you’re a woman.”
The accreditation group did not directly explain the change, but reported that the updated standards were redesigned to better match expectations for students entering residency. This shift comes as diversity and equity efforts in medicine face growing scrutiny.
Political Pressure and Legal Investigations
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) recently contacted three medical schools as part of an investigation into admissions practices. “At this time, our investigation will focus on possible race discrimination in medical school admissions,” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, wrote in letters to the schools, according to The New York Times, which first revealed the investigations.
In 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in medical schools. While some groups support the accreditation change, others are concerned about its implications.
Perspectives on the Change
The organization Do No Harm called the update “a major victory and step forward in the ongoing battle over the future of medical education in America.” However, the change does not prevent schools from teaching these topics. Experts, however, say it could lead some programs to deprioritize them.
Advocates of teaching about structural factors argue that the change could have real consequences for patient care. They believe that understanding factors like housing, nutrition, and access to clean water helps doctors treat all patients, not just certain groups of people.
“There are things that the MAHA people care about that are structural,” Ariana Thompson-Lastad, a medical sociologist with the Structural Competency Working Group, told STAT News.
The idea of structural competency was introduced by Dr. Jonathan Metzl, who said it encourages doctors to identify factors beyond the health care system that affect patient health.
“Structural competency is about structures, it’s not about Republicans or Democrats. I would say that certainly there’s individual choice rhetoric, but there’s nothing in what we’ve been doing that says that individual choice is not important,” Metzl explained.
“My hope with structural competency was that it was something that could actually help bridge political divides around health. Because it’s community-focused and having to do with health finances and costs for medications: things that were important to our last government, and to this government.”
Implications for Patient Care
Experts suggest that how doctors are trained may shape how they understand and treat your health. The removal of specific guidelines on health inequities could influence the way future physicians approach patient care, potentially leading to less emphasis on the social determinants of health.
More information on the importance of prioritizing health disparities in medical education can be found through the NIH National Library of Medicine.
