Human rights in health professionals’ education: making students aware of what the deprivation of the right to health means

Abstract

This paper puts the finger on the barriers that “overstretched positivist biomedical curricula” pose to openings to a more humanistic approach to the education of health and nutrition professionals. Universities clearly favor “preparing career-ready graduates” so that curricula, in our case, staunchly avoid “critical pedagogies that promote a justice-enhancing health professional praxis”; “politicizing their curricula, their pedagogies, and the (social) engagement of their students” is far removed from their aims. Not that students mind; they remain buried in the “tell-me-what-I-need-to-know learning culture” --and this is yet another barrier to overcome since, given their mostly middle-class extraction, they are comfortable with “the status-quo that an individualistic professional practice offers them, (in practice) far removing them from critical (social and civic) thinking”. For all these reasons, “guiding those novice professionals to a career of political engagement is (better late than never) an absolute necessity for social change and social justice in health care”. This paper opens avenues in this realm --more specifically in the area of human rights learning.