Overview: Health care providers increasingly communicate with and treat patients with diverse cultural experiences. In addition to diverse race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, physical or mental ability, and sexual orientation, people have their own unique experiences and identities. Identity involves personality and temperament, economic issues, profession, family and social roles, beliefs about illness and treatment and so forth. Cultural identity is determined by personal choice as well as individual life experiences.

How Cultural Competence in Health Care Works: Health providers can build knowledge, awareness and skills to work effectively and productively with a range of differences and to appreciate and benefit from expressions of individual cultural identity. This involves continually developing:

• comfort with differences,
• ability to control and change false beliefs and assumptions,
• respect and appreciation for the values and beliefs of those who are different,
• flexible thinking, and
• flexible responses and behavior.

The Payoff: Culturally competent health providers--individual providers, provider groups and organizations, and networked systems of care--can work effectively and productively with diverse cultural groups and with culturally diverse individuals.

How to Make It Happen: Health providers and provider groups join with facilitators to develop awareness, knowledge, skills and action plans to bring about meaningful and on-going change in their frameworks for culturally responsive thoughts and actions, using tools such as:

• electronic surveys and cultural audits,
• awareness, knowledge and skills development
• dialog groups,
• learning organization/community skills.

Senge, P.M. et al (1994), The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization, New York, NY: Doubleday.

Weisbord M.R., (1992), Discovering Common Ground: How Future Search Conferences Bring People Together to Achieve…, San Francisco, CA: Berrett Koehler Publishers.

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, Bureau of Primary Health Care. World Wide Web.1998.