Teaching social determinants of First Nations health in medical and health curricula: A review of the literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This review examines contemporary curricular approaches to teaching the social determinants of health (SDoH) for First Nations peoples in Australian medical and health education. The purpose was to synthesise existing literature, identify common themes and gaps, and assess how tertiary education equips health professionals to address inequities in healthcare delivery for First Nations communities. Methods A narrative literature review was conducted between 2020 and 2024. Search terms reflected tertiary health education, SDoH, and First Nations health. Grey literature, frameworks, policies, and reports were also included. A total of 43 relevant sources were analysed thematically. Main findings The review found that First Nations health has been recognised as an accreditation standard since 2006, yet teaching approaches remain highly variable across institutions. Five recurring themes were identified: the impact of colonisation on health outcomes; recognition of Indigenous ways of health and healing; centring Indigenous voices and leadership; embedding anti-racism teaching; and highlighting health inequities within the healthcare system. Recommended practices included horizontal and vertical integration of Indigenous health content, community-based and immersion learning, and the adoption of holistic frameworks such as the Social and Emotional Wellbeing Wheel and Two-Eyed Seeing. Principal conclusions Despite multiple frameworks and guiding principles, no nationally consistent or comprehensive approach to teaching SDoH for First Nations health currently exists across Australian tertiary institutions. Curriculum redesign is essential, grounded in decolonising pedagogies and First Nations leadership.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".