Development and Implementation of a Multicultural Consultation Service Within an Academic Medical Center

Abstract

A major challenge for our field is to ensure we meet the growing demand for culturally sensitive and responsive evidence-based practices to keep up with changing demographics in the U.S. as well as calls to action by our field. To address the mental health imperative to improve the multicultural competence of clinicians and to provide appropriate care, it is important to create opportunities for clinicians to receive training in this area. One route to meet these demands is to provide ongoing multicultural peer consultation to clinical providers. This model also facilitates direct application to clinical work. To that end, we present herein a model for developing and implementing a multicultural peer consultation team. In our implementation, our consultation team aimed to function as therapy for therapists in the context of provision of empirically supported, principle-driven cognitive and behavioral therapies, with a consultation focus on multicultural perspectives and multicultural competence. We demarcate consultation needs within an academic medical center, identify facilitators and barriers to implementation of the service, and provide recommendations for future directions. Moreover, herein we present a case study to demonstrate the process of multicultural peer consultation.