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I design and deliver training programs to improve an organization’s capacity to offer culturally responsive health care services.  However, before a health care system can deliver culturally competent health care, we must identify if any systemic, institutionalized bias is reducing the quality of health care. Otherwise, health care organizations will continue to operate with institutionalized, structural and systemic bias leading to health care disparities, patient dissatisfaction and less than optimal outcomes for patients.

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America is experiencing increasing diversity which is challenging our health care delivery system to create culturally proficient services that meet the social and cultural needs of patients.  Health care organizations are realizing that unless their providers are trained to deliver culturally and linguistically proficient services with the highest quality of care, health disparities will continue to negatively influence the care patients receive.

 

How Health Care Organizations Can Reduce Health Care Disparities

Health care organizations that integrate cultural competency into their training programs reduce disparities in health care and are more respected and trusted in delivering inclusive and effective health care.  Training in how to deliver culturally proficient care must become an organizational priority to attain optimal institutional efficiency, to reduce cost and remove barriers interfering with access to treatment.  Otherwise, health care organizations will continue to operate with structural and systemic bias leading to health care disparities, patient dissatisfaction and decreased optimal well-being and outcomes for patients.

 

It is imperative health care professionals become culturally and linguistically competent so they can enhance patient engagement and care for patients across a wide range of cultural needs. In addition, culturally competent health care systems recognize the importance of assessing patients using an integrated, biopsychosocial model that appreciates the influence of a patient’s biological, spiritual, cultural/social needs and race.  These factors influence how patients experience their illness and relationship with their health care provider.

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Length of Training: Three (3) Hours

 

Learning Objectives:

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• Define culture, cultural humility, cultural sensitivity and cultural competence

• Appreciate the benefits of respectful communication; how providing responsive, culturally proficient care increases therapeutic alliance with patients

• Understand that quality health care can only occur within the patient’s cultural context.

• Understand how ignoring diversity and culturally incongruent health care can adversely affect patient outcomes, compromise patient safety and result in patient dissatisfaction.

• Learn how to eliminate misunderstandings in diagnosis and treatment planning that may result from differences in language or culture, how culture shapes appraisal of emotions.

• Identify how your counterproductive assumptions/ implicit biases can negatively impact patient care.

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• Is your health care organization providing culturally competent and responsive services that translates to patients feeling like they matter? 

• Are your patients engaged with their health care provider and are they receiving care embedded in their cultural and ethnic context; where they feel understood and experience you as worthy of their respect, confidence and trust?

• Is your health care organization operating with systemic bias toward minorities, people of color or underserved populations resulting in patients receiving less than optimal care which contributes to health disparities and patient dissatisfaction?

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For quality health care to be provided, it must emerge within the patient’s cultural, social and linguistic context.  In addition, health care providers may be unaware of how their implicit biases influence the interactions and perceptions of their patients across a wide spectrum of race, ethnicity, gender and social class. Health care providers will reduce misunderstandings in diagnosis and treatment if they commit themselves to generating insight into how their implicit biases can influence their perceptions of their patients from underserved, minority backgrounds. A culturally and linguistically competent health care provider will engender a  therapeutic alliance to increase patient satisfaction.  The competent health care provider understands how their patient’s culture influences their health care beliefs, practices toward care and how to create trust in their provider’s care.  The objective is for the provider to possess cultural humility and cultural competence.  A culturally proficient health care provider understands how the etiology of disease states/illnesses vary from culture to culture, how illness is perceived across cultures and their patient’s expectations.

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