Cultural Competency

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The Practitioner Connection
Volume XLI, 1st Quarter

The right help at the right time!

Culutural Competency - Increase Quality of Care and Improve Patient Compliance

Mary
Mary has symptoms that indicate she may have schizophrenia. She hears voices but is reluctant to schedule a psychiatric appointment – she feels that if she has schizophrenia, perhaps this is the way she is meant to be.

Luke
Luke was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and needs to be on regular medication – he cannot afford the medication prescribed by his psychiatrist needed to maintain good mental health.

James
James is a five-year-old boy who needs a psychiatric evaluation due to unacceptable behavior at school and at home – his parents don’t speak English and are having trouble scheduling an appointment.

The scenarios to the right are real-life challenges patients face each day. These challenges can result in health disparities – preventable differences in people’s ability to achieve optimal behavioral health.

Reducing Barriers through Effective Communication

Quality behavioral health care requires effective communication between patients and their behavioral health care professional. However, nearly half of all physicians in the United States report that their ability to provide quality care is affected by difficulty communicating with patients because of language or cultural barriers.1 The Institute of Medicine and the National Quality Forum have outlined measures that can be taken to help reduce these barriers. These actions can improve communication between behavioral health care professionals and their patients who speak foreign languages.

Training Can Help

Cultural competency in health care is the ability of health care professionals to understand a patient's diverse values, beliefs, and behaviors, and to customize interventions to meet the patient's social, cultural, and linguistic needs. Cultural competency training can help behavioral health care professionals build skills to better understand, and to communicate and effectively interact with, patients in cross-cultural encounters.

The challenges behavioral health care professionals face in providing quality behavioral health care to all of their patients will continue to grow as the U.S. population becomes increasingly diverse. It is true that disparities can stem from many factors beyond the behavioral health care professional-patient encounter. However, your ability to communicate effectively with patients, and understand their cultural and social contexts, is critical to effectively care for a diverse patient population.

Training Resource

A Physician's Practical Guide to Culturally Competent Care.. The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services offers education and awareness in cultural competency for health care professionals. For more information, please visit: https://cccm.thinkculturalhealth.hhs.gov.