The first article goes into great detail on which healthcare interventions worked and didn't work relating to cultural competency. It not only reviewed and rated each intervention but they were able to draw conclusions on the actual effectiveness of healthcare interventions regarding cultural competency. The studies show that not only are employers telling their employees to be culturally competent, they are developing training methods to make their employees more culturally competent. This article does a great job in showing the benefits to developing these training methods. These don't only have to be done in healthcare however. I could see this working wonderful in my profession of accounting where we deal with people from different backgrounds all the time, and cultures vary widely on how they deal with money. We could use this training to better learn about other cultures beliefs and values. We are becoming a lot more international due to the internet and it is a lot more common to be working on the books of an international client. Cultural competency training could also help us communicate a lot more effectively with these clients. This source was found using Google Scholar, published using a .gov domain name, and the authors had a long list of credentials (PhD's MBA's etc.).
My second source does a great job on targeting the emerging practices. The most beneficial part of reading this article was how it pointed out that it's the company's leaders who are creating the systems and policies of the company. If you don't hire a diverse group of leaders (CFO, CMO, CEO, VP's of different operations) how can you ever expect your company to respect diverse cultures? It's crucial to have diverse leaders of the company help in setting up how the company will run. It's important to have cultural competency instilled in the companies systems/policies/values. I believe that this applies to literally any corporation, not just healthcare. Again this applies excellent in the accounting world, you need to have the higher ups instill culturally competency in the company. This source was found using Google Scholar as well, published using a .gov domain name, and the authors attended and or work at prestigious medical schools.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3137284/
http://www.azdhs.gov/bhs/pdf/culturalComp/cchc.pdf
Cody, these are some great resources you found. I particularly enjoyed the research on which interventions were beneficial and actually effective in practice versus those which were not effective or perhaps just not practical. It really highlights just how much this is a learning process and that we will get some things wrong and we will have to continue to tweak and create new attempts as time passes.
ReplyDeleteCody, I love the focus of these resources; the first being to shed light on the benefits of cultural competency and the second being to show that a lack of diversity at the top of an organization has a ripple effect that can be felt even at the lowest level. When lack of diversity can be felt at the bottom, this means that sensitivity to people of different backgrounds has likely been thrown out the window, and for people dealing with healthcare organizations, this will play a negative role in patient outcomes. - Amy
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