About

Dr. Michael John Harvey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Services, Policy, and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health. His work draws broadly on the social sciences and qualitative methods to examine topics related to public health and public health education. He has a passion for the classroom and has taught courses on the US health care system, health policy analysis, comparative health care systems, global health, and public health theory, among others. For the past 10 years, he has been involved in rural Guatemala collaborating with colleagues there to expand access to health care services, principally through his work with the Hospitalito Atitlán. Dr. Harvey holds a Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) degree from the University of California, Berkeley and a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Medicine
• Medical education
• Epistemology
• Nursing
• Psychology
• Political economy
• Economics
• Philosophy
• Public relations
• Geography
• Social psychology
• Pedagogy
• Economic growth
• Law

Selected publications

• Structural competency, Latin American social medicine, and collective health: Exploring shared lessons through the work of Jaime Breilh

  Global Public Health · 2023-01-02 · 17 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Structural competency is a recent framework for understanding and addressing the structural drivers of disease. Latin American Social Medicine and Collective Health is a decades-long movement similarly concerned with the study and transformation of social structures to achieve health equity. In this paper, we put insights from Latin American Social Medicine and Collective Health into conversation with the developing structural competency framework. We focus specifically on insights from Jaime Breilh’s new article summarising his theoretical work on medical ethics and rights in this special issue and his new book, Critical Epidemiology and the People’s Health. This paper is comprised of three parts. Part 1 provides an introduction to the structural competency framework. Part 2 provides an overview of the Latin American Social Medicine and Collective Health movement, along with a summary of the social determination of health paradigm. Part 3 places insights from these works into conversation with structural competency and considers ways in which Latin American Social Medicine and Collective Health might inform the further development of structural competency, and potentially vice versa. The paper closes by calling for greater attention to Latin American Social Medicine and Collective Health among those committed to health equity within the anglophone world.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Framing health, behavior, and society: a critical content analysis of public health social and behavioral science textbooks

  Critical Public Health · 2022-07-08 · 15 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Despite the increasing focus within public health on the social determinants of health and ‘structural approaches’ over the past three decades, controversy remains regarding the field’s relative emphasis on the behaviors of individuals versus the organization of societies when explaining why some are healthy and others are not. This research seeks to clarify how authoritative sources within public health instruction frame the relationship among behavior, society, and health by identifying common themes within social and behavioral science textbooks assigned within MPH programs located primarily in the US. Textbook analysis was informed by a modified grounded theory approach and is situated broadly within the critical discourse analysis tradition. Common themes include: the primacy of behavior to health outcomes; the purpose of public health theory is explaining behavior and informing behavior change; social and individual factors influence health behaviors; and ecological approaches are necessary for behavior change. Notable divergences from these themes are also discussed. These findings suggest a continuing need to think critically about how health, behavior, and society are framed within public health instruction specifically and within the field of public health more broadly. We close by considering the relevance of social theories of health inequality and structural competency to these discussions.

  PublisherDOI

• Thinking with and Against the Social Determinants of Health: The Latin American Social Medicine (Collective Health) Critique from Jaime Breilh

  International Journal of Health Services · 2022-09-01 · 32 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  The concept of the social determinants of health has become increasingly accepted and mainstream in anglophone public health over the past three decades. Moreover, it has been widely adopted into diverse geographic, sociocultural, and linguistic contexts. By recognizing the role of social conditions in influencing health inequalities, the concept challenges narrow behavioral and reductive biological understandings of health. Despite this, scholars and activists have critiqued the concept of the social determinants of health for being incomplete and even misrepresenting the true nature of health inequities. Arguably, these critiques have been most thoroughly developed among those working in the Latin American social medicine and collective health traditions who formulated the “social determination of health” paradigm and the concept of interculturality decades prior to the advent of the social determinants of health. We draw on Jaime Breilh's main works, with a focus on the recently published book, Critical Epidemiology and the People's Health, to (1) provide a broad overview of the social determination of health paradigm and its approach to interculturality and (2) clarify how these ideas and the broader collective health movement challenge assumptions within the social determinants of health concept.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Do We Explain the Social, Political, and Economic Determinants of Health? A Call for the Inclusion of Social Theories of Health Inequality Within U.S.-Based Public Health Pedagogy

  Pedagogy in Health Promotion · 2020-07-02 · 22 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  New public health educational competencies include the ability to explain social phenomena—such as politics, globalization, and racism—and their relationship to health and disease. Formal explanations of social phenomena call for social theory. However, public health pedagogy is principally concerned with behavioral theory. This piece surveys the behavioral theoretical status quo within public health pedagogy and discusses its implication. The concept of “social theories of health inequality”—that is, explanations of health-relevant social phenomena and their role in producing differences in health, morbidity, and mortality—is proposed as one way of fulfilling new educational competencies. Emerging social theories of health inequality are identified and discussed in relation to public health pedagogy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Structural Competency: Curriculum for Medical Students, Residents, and Interprofessional Teams on the Structural Factors That Produce Health Disparities

  MedEdPORTAL · 2020 · 252 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Medical education

  Introduction: Research on disparities in health and health care has demonstrated that social, economic, and political factors are key drivers of poor health outcomes. Yet the role of such structural forces on health and health care has been incorporated unevenly into medical training. The framework of structural competency offers a paradigm for training health professionals to recognize and respond to the impact of upstream, structural factors on patient health and health care. Methods: We report on a brief, interprofessional structural competency curriculum implemented in 32 distinct instances between 2015 and 2017 throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. In consultation with medical and interprofessional education experts, we developed open-ended, written-response surveys to qualitatively evaluate this curriculum's impact on participants. Qualitative data from 15 iterations were analyzed via directed thematic analysis, coding language, and concepts to identify key themes. Results: Three core themes emerged from analysis of participants' comments. First, participants valued the curriculum's focus on the application of the structural competency framework in real-world clinical, community, and policy contexts. Second, participants with clinical experience (residents, fellows, and faculty) reported that the curriculum helped them reframe how they thought about patients. Third, participants reported feeling reconnected to their original motivations for entering the health professions. Discussion: This structural competency curriculum fills a gap in health professional education by equipping learners to understand and respond to the role that social, economic, and political structural factors play in patient and community health.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Structural competency and global health education

  Global Public Health · 2020 · 54 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Public relations

  Structural competency is a new curricular framework for training health professionals to recognise and respond to disease and its unequal distribution as the outcome of social structures, such as economic and legal systems, healthcare and taxation policies, and international institutions. While extensive global health research has linked social structures to the disproportionate burden of disease in the Global South, formal attempts to incorporate the structural competency framework into US-based global health education have not been described in the literature. This paper fills this gap by articulating five sub-competencies for structurally competent global health instruction. Authors drew on their experiences developing global health and structural competency curricula-and consulted relevant structural competency, global health, social science, social theory, and social determinants of health literatures. The five sub-competencies include: (1) Describe the role of social structures in producing and maintaining health inequities globally, (2) Identify the ways that structural inequalities are naturalised within the field of global health, (3) Discuss the impact of structures on the practice of global health, (4) Recognise structural interventions for addressing global health inequities, and (5) Apply the concept of structural humility in the context of global health.

  PublisherDOI

• The Political Economy of Health: Revisiting Its Marxian Origins to Address 21st-Century Health Inequalities

  American Journal of Public Health · 2020 · 68 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  The "political economy of health" is concerned with how political and economic domains interact and shape individual and population health outcomes. However, the term is variously defined in the public health, medical, and social science literatures.This could result in confusion about the term and its associated tradition, thereby constituting a barrier to its application in public health research and practice.To address these issues, I survey the political economy of health tradition, clarify its specifically Marxian theoretical legacy, and discuss its relevance to understanding and addressing public health issues. I conclude by discussing the benefits of employing critical theories of race and racism with Marxian political economy to better understand the roles of class exploitation and racial oppression in epidemiological patterning.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Structural Competency Working Group: Lessons from Iterative, Interdisciplinary Development of a Structural Competency Training Module

  2019-01-01 · 26 citations

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Explaining the origins and distribution of health and disease: an analysis of epidemiologic theory in core Master of Public Health coursework in the United States

  Critical Public Health · 2018-10-18 · 17 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Michael Harvey*a & Margaret McGladreyba Department of Health Science and Recreation, San José State University, San Jose, CA, USAb Tisch College of Civic Life and Department of Sociology, Tufts University, Medford, USA

  PublisherDOI

• Prevalence, Disparities, And Determinants Of Primary Cesarean Births Among First-Time Mothers In Mexico

  Health Affairs · 2017-04-01 · 24 citations

  article

  Mexico has the second-highest prevalence of cesarean deliveries in the Americas, behind Brazil. Having had a previous cesarean delivery is highly predictive of having subsequent cesarean deliveries, yet evidence on the drivers of primary (that is, first-time) cesarean deliveries is sparse. Using 2014 Mexican birth certificate data and performing population-level analyses of data on 600,124 first-time mothers giving birth after at least thirty-seven weeks of gestation, we examined the prevalence and determinants of primary cesarean deliveries. We found a very high prevalence of cesarean deliveries among these women-48.7 percent-and wide variations across insurance coverage types. Enrollees in Seguro Popular, the public health insurance program introduced in 2003 for the previously uninsured and gradually rolled out nationally, had a cesarean rate of 40 percent, while women insured through the Social Security Institute for Civil Servants had a rate of 78 percent. The lower risk of primary cesarean deliveries among Seguro Popular enrollees persisted after adjustment for covariates. Rates of primary cesarean deliveries were particularly high in private birthing facilities for all first-time mothers. Reducing the rate of cesarean deliveries in Mexico will require interventions across types of insurance and birthing facilities and will also require targeted public health messaging.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Seth M. Holmes

  Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats

  16 shared

• Carlos Piñones Rivera

  University of Tarapacá

  4 shared

• Jenifer Matthews

  Osher Center for Integrative Medicine

  3 shared

• Joia S. Mukherjee

  3 shared

• Kelly R. Knight

  University of California, San Francisco

  3 shared

• J Neff

  3 shared

• Dilys Walker

  Global Brain Health Institute

  3 shared

• Charles C. Branas

  University of Otago

  2 shared

Education

• Other

  University of California at Berkeley

  2017

• Other

  University of Pennsylvania