Cultural Competence Pointers for Clinicians
Robert C. Like, MD, MS, Director of the Center for Healthy Families and Cultural Diversity, Department of Family Medicine, UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, reminds us that …
- As clinicians, we need to “check our own pulse” and become aware of personal attitudes, beliefs, biases, and behaviors that may influence (consciously or unconsciously) our care of patients as well as our interactions with professional colleagues and staff from diverse racial, ethnic, and sociocultural backgrounds.
- Every clinical encounter is cross-cultural. Developing partnerships with our patients and maintaining “cultural humility” can help us to learn 06/12/2008, occupational, and environmental contexts in which our patients live.
- It should be understood that there is no “one” way to treat any racial and ethnic group, given the great sociocultural diversity within these broad classifications. We need instead to have a framework of interventions that can be individualized and applied in a patient- and family-centered fashion.
- Clinical and preventive care needs to be evidence-based, flexible, authentic, and ethical. We need to appropriately tailor our interventions to patients, families, and communities.
- Cookbook approaches about working with patients from diverse sociocultural backgrounds are not useful and instead risk potentially dangerous stereotyping and overgeneralization. Important intergenerational differences exist, and diversity is often greater within groups than between them.
- We need to challenge and confront racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of prejudice and discrimination that occur in clinical encounters as well as in the society-at-large.
Through collaboration and achieving a better understanding and appreciation of our commonalties and differences, patients and physicians can become empowered to work together with others to help eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health care. (Betancourt and Like, 2000)