International and Domestic Health Equity and Leadership (IDHEAL) UCLA Emergency Medicine

Teaching Modules - Objectives

Every healthcare professional encounters patients with unmet social needs, however, medical training programs do not cover social determinants in a uniform way. The curriculum is designed to be an introduction to the social determinants of health, their impact, and how to identify and address unmet social needs in the clinical setting. Specifically, the curriculum has four main objectives:

1. To demonstrate the intersection of social determinants of health, unmet social needs and acute emergency department visits as they relate to emergency department care and to connect these concepts to the overarching theme of health equity;
2. To purvey this content in a case based-format that will be easily accessible to learners in healthcare;
3. To support faculty in medical training programs (medicine, nursing, allied health professionals) who may not be experts but wish to teach about social determinants;
4. To help the learner develop a process for identifying and addressing patients' challenges with social determinants of health.


We have included recommended screening questions for each domain. These questions are based on the recommendation of the Los Angeles County Health Agency's Social and Behavioral Determinants of Health workgroup (White Paper forthcoming).