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

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.