Bridges, Not Walls: Building Trust Through Advocacy Training
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June 25, 2026
A patient arrives for a follow-up appointment, but managing their diabetes isn’t the biggest challenge. They don’t know where they’re going to sleep next week. Another patient skips their needed medications because they have to choose between prescriptions and groceries. For physicians and trainees, these situations raise an important question: What role should clinicians play in advocating to address the conditions that shape their patient’s health beyond the exam room?
Scenarios like these reflect the real-world challenges explored through the Minnesota Advocacy Project, an interdisciplinary human rights-advocacy curriculum directed by Dr. Adriana Dhawan at the University of Minnesota. Developed by faculty in the Med/Peds residency program and in the Masters of Human Rights program, the course equips residents and graduate students with the skills they need to advocate for patients and communities facing systemic barriers to health.
Supported by the Building Trust: Advancing Health Equity grant program, the curriculum began with pilot workshops that gained significant resident and medical student interest at the University of Minnesota. “There was lots of good feedback from the formative ‘flash feedback’ focus groups to inform the structure of the curriculum and content areas,” Dr. Dhawan shared. She then leveraged implementation data from the pilot workshops to develop full-semester iterations of the course, which is cross-listed between public health and law departments. Medical residents from the Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, and Med-Peds residency programs are invited to attend for free as non-credit participants as part of the recent Physician Advocacy Pathway.
The course uses a human rights framework for advocacy, teaching through small group interactive case discussions, simulation, and cooperative games. Students learn about the relationship between human rights and the social determinants of health, as well as how to map complex systems. They develop their skills to compare different advocacy tactics, work in teams to implement these tactics toward advancing an advocacy campaign, and practice considering the values of individuals and communities impacted by events in the campaign.
From the spring semester to fall semester 2025, participation has grown from less than 10 participants to 18 participants, with five interprofessional facilitators. One participant, now a chief resident, joined the grant team as a facilitator after completion of the advocacy course.
“As participants from different disciplines work together and teach each other, we get to watch them co-create innovative approaches to solve real-world wicked problems. It’s been really exciting and feels like it has potential to be even better,” Dr. Dhawan shared. “This course is the first of its kind at the University of Minnesota. It promotes a human rights framework as a powerful tool for health systems change and encourages interdisciplinary collaboration in residency education.”
Her team is now analyzing the results from informal feedback, focus groups, and surveys to iterate and improve the next version of the course, with the aim of drawing in more resident involvement in the course.
Advocacy is a key means for physicians to build trust with patients from vulnerable communities. When physicians stand up for patients against unfair or inequitable circumstances, they are perceived as allies, not obstacles. The Minnesota Advocacy Project trains the next generation of physicians to build bridges, not walls, to achieve patient access to care both now and in the future.
