Effectiveness of alternative approaches to integrating SDOH into medical education: a scoping review

Background There is increasing recognition of including social determinants of health (SDOH) in teaching for future doctors. However, the educational methods and the extent of integration into the curriculum vary considerably—this scoping review is aimed at how SDOH has been introduced into medical schools' curricula. Methods A systematic search was performed of six electronic databases, including PubMed, Education Source, Scopus, OVID (Medline), APA Psych Info, and ERIC. Articles were excluded if they did not cover the SDOH curriculum for medical students; were based on service-learning rather than didactic content; were pilot courses, or were not in English, leaving eight articles in the final study. Results The initial search yielded 654 articles after removing duplicates. In the first screening step, 588 articles were excluded after applying inclusion and exclusion criteria and quality assessment; we examined 66 articles, a total of eight included in the study.