Beyond Professional Licensure: A Statement of Principle on Culturally-Responsive Healthcare

Abstract

This work calls on healthcare institutions and organizations to move toward inclusive recognition and representation of healthcare practitioners whose credibility is established both inside and outside of professional licensure mechanisms. Despite professional licensure’s advantages, this credentialing mechanism has in many cases served to reinforce unjust sociocultural power relations in relation to ethnicity and race, class and gender. To foster health equity and the delivery of culturally-responsive care, it is essential that mechanisms other than licensure be recognized as legitimate pathways for community accountability, safety and quality assurance. Such mechanisms include certification with non-statutory occupational bodies, as well as community-based recognition pathways such as those engaged for Community Health Workers (including Promotores de Salud ) and Indigenous healing practitioners. Implementation of this vision will require interdisciplinary dialogue and reconciliation, constructive collaboration, and shared decision making between healthcare institutions and organizations, practitioners and the communities they serve.