Cultural Competency in the Trenches

Abstract

core mission of health professions schools is to educate and train a workforce that will be optimally prepared to provide health care and public health services for the diverse communities that they serve. It is important to create and develop a health care workforce who can understand and assist in the battle against health care disparities. For health care workers and health profession schools, cultural competence education and training has been identified as one solution to the problem. However to educate and properly train a culturally competent health care workforce is not an easy task. The literature on cultural competency is growing, with numerous studies that have focused on specific traits of cultural competency but unfortunately, a consensus on the best approach to achieve the desired outcomes has not been reached. A review of the literature on cultural competency reveals some common concerns regarding cultural competency, especially about how cultural competence education is incorporated in the classroom/clinical setting. What training and preparation does the instructor possess to qualify him or her to teach cultural competency? Was the instructor chosen because of gender or because he/she is from a racial or ethnic minority group which somehow makes him/her an expert? How much time should be devoted to cultural competency training in health professions? How do we accurately assess student learning of cultural competency? And finally, how do we as faculty committed to cultural competency get our colleagues to also participate in cultural training/education? These are key ques- tions, concerns, and problems that many who teach cultural competency training have encountered. Therefore, a variety of approaches to cultural competency education and training have been developed within our schools. Earlier this year, a joint expert panel convened by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Association of Schools of Public Health released a report with recommendations for Schools of medicine and public health defining a set of