The courage to advocate: How two professions approach public advocacy work

While health advocacy is an established physician role, most of the educational attention to advocacy has been at the individual patient level. Public advocacy-efforts to effect change at the level of communities, populations or society-remains a poorly defined concept whose educational foundation is underdeveloped. To enrich our understanding of public advocacy, we explored how professionals in two disciplines-medicine and law-have approached its tasks and experienced its challenges.