Provider, Heal Thy System: An Examination of Institutionally Racist Healthcare Regulatory Practices and Structures.

U.S. history is fraught with examples of systemic racism-at all ecological levels and within all geopolitical contexts. Whether scholars historically punctuate these phenomena through white racial framing begun in the 1600s or the Black civil rights movement of the 1960s, research across disciplines brings into focus a twenty-generation story of injustice. These phenomena present a paradoxical struggle within healthcare systems populated by professionals who have made a "conscious commitment to equity and helping those in need." However, both healthcare systems and embedded care providers operate in relation to organizational structures that frequently reify racist policies. As natural and professional agents of change, medical family therapists are especially positioned to examine how regulatory systems at every level influence institutional racism within the medical and mental health fields. In this manuscript we examine health system policies and practices using the lens of C.J. Peek's Four Worlds: Clinical, Operational, Financial, and Training. Examples of institutional racism are discussed and recommendations for approaches to change are provided.

Recruiting and training multilingual family therapists: A content analysis of COAMFTE-accredited marriage and family therapy program websites.

Among U. S. Limited English Proficiency (LEP) communities, language needs and preferences create significant barriers to accessing quality healthcare and contribute to growing physical and mental health disparities. To mitigate these barriers, it is critical to recruit and train a new generation of linguistically diverse providers, including marriage and family therapists (MFTs). This study examined how Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) program website content promotes a commitment to recruiting and training multilingual MFTs. The study sample consisted of all currently accredited programs (N = 122) and included coding for the presence or absence of (a) an explicit commitment to multiculturally and linguistically informed training, (b) specialized multilingual training and supports, and (c) multilingual faculty involved in training multilingual students or engaged in related scholarship. Results indicate that a majority of MFT programs are communicating a commitment to multiculturally informed training, but the same is not true of linguistically responsive training.