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organizations, including the American Association of Colleges of Nurses, view cultural humility
as the supporting framework for developing cultural competencies.
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Cultural competency is a
journey throughout a lifetime, not a goal or an achievement.
RESOURCES FOR OBTAINING CULTURAL COMPETENCY
EDUCATION FOR HEALTH CARE
An excellent and thought-provoking book called
Seeing Patients: Unconscious Bias in Health
Care
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was written by a Black physician at Harvard named Augustus A. White III in 2011.
Dr. White
describes how doctors - for the most part without conscious malice - discriminate
systematically against racial minorities, women, those from different cultures, the elderly,
and even the obese. In an effort to advance “culturally competent care,” he offers not only
his own experience trying to achieve this goal, but also professional guidelines and practical
suggestions for expanding personal cultural literacy as well as an awareness of personal
biases. He maintains that healthcare providers must learn to communicate effectively with
different kinds of patients, learn their languages, understand their cultures, and begin to see
patients as individual persons, not simply as individual instances of categories like race,
gender and age. His book raises serious moral considerations about the inequalities in
contemporary medical practice, inequalities that must to be articulated to be eliminated.
Cultural competence education focuses on equipping healthcare providers with tools and
skills to help them overcome some of the major causes of poor quality health care, especially
for diverse populations. Both the government as well as private organizations provide online
education about cultural competence. Two of the better-known resources are the Office of
Minority Health, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and a private
company called Quality Interactions.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health
The Office of Minority Health has National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically
Appropriate Services (CLAS) in Health and Health Care to provide individuals and
organizations with a blueprint for successfully implementing and maintaining culturally and
linguistically appropriate services. The National CLAS Standards are intended to advance
health equity, improve quality, and help eliminate health care disparities. Adoption of these
Standards will help advance the cause of better health and health care in the United States.
Accompanying the National CLAS Standards is a technical assistance document entitled,
The
National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health and Health
Care: A Blueprint for Sustaining CLAS Policy and Practice (The Blueprint)
, which aims to
provide comprehensive, but not exhaustive, information on each Standard.
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The Office of Minority Health offers free online continuing education courses for physicians,
nurses, and other healthcare professionals about guidelines for providing culturally
competent care.
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Quality Interactions
Quality Interactions,
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a privately-held company founded and owned three practicing
physicians (Drs. Joseph Betancourt, Alexander Green, and Emilio Carrillo) has trained