Question

Imagine that you are setting up a cultural competency training program for the staff (clinicians, nurses, support staff) at your CURRENT practice setting (workplace). How would you incorporate knowledge and skills training and what would you include? Include references.

Answer 1

In a medical setting, the communication between the clinicans, patients, nurses and other support staff is fundamental. The vast diversity results in health disparities which can defined as a gap in quality of health and health care across racial, ethic and socioeconomic group. A cultural competency is the ability to interact effectively with people of different cultures. The major aspect in developing a good cultural competency is to have awareness about once own cuture, attitude towards cutural differences, to gain knowledge about various cultural practices worldwide and cross cultural skills. A cultural competency training is program that provides training to achieve cultural competency and the ability to understand, communicate and appreciate accurately others cultures.

The cultural competency training is planned according to the environment and type of work. These methods helps to enhance transparency between values, language, beliefs and cultural differences.There are basically three major areas which has to be focussed while developing a cultural competency training. These are gender, race and religion. In our workplace, people of different gender race and religion arrives to seek medical health care assistance. Our knowledge and skill can be developed to gain cultural competency by various sessions of lectures, discussions and role plays. These will help to identify the existing knowledge, skills and concepts about managing the various cultural disparities. It will further help to develop a proper cultural competency training program.

The various things to be included in the cultural competency training are:

• The program should include the LGBTQIAP community i.e Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, queer, questioning,intersex, asexual,ally and pansexual. The training should help the staff to develop knowledge and skills on how to address the issues and to be aware about the type of language that is politically correct.
• When deal with people with racial disparities, the staff should develop the approach of color blindness. This will help the staff to look at individual as humans rather than belonging to a particular race.
• Religious competency training is also highly essential. It refers to the skills, practices and orientation that will recognize and explore patients religiosity to facilitate diagnosis, recovery and healing. These issues should be handled in a humble, respectful and empathetic manner. Active listening and nonjudgemental actions and talks are also important.
• Use of modern channel of communications like social media, emails and chat rooms will avoid errors and misunderstanding.
• Courses on global leadership should be provided to develop global leaders who will have high cultural intelligence and teamwork skills.
• The classes in the training should be interconnected and the knowledge given should be easily accessible.
• Evaluation of their knowledge and skill after the training is important.
• A central database system should be maintained to retain the knowledge. This will help the staff to develop their own knowledge and internal networks through shared experiences.

References:

1) Cultural competency training wikipedia

2) Neal Goodman, Training for cultural competence