Cultural Competence

We are all in some measure competent within our own cultures - although we all also have days when we feel anything but competent. This ability to understand the structures, habits, customs, and constraints of our own cultural system allows us to accomplish the tasks that we need to undertake to get through each day: To stop at red lights, to wear clothing appropriate to our age, gender, and position, to know when it is our turn to speak in a conversation, to order food at a restaurant. Each person who has grown up within a culture has acquired at least much of the skills and knowledge needed to function within it but - and here is the catch - most of this learning has been done tacitly, without our even being aware of it. We simply learned the myriad facts about our culture as we grew up immersed in it in the same way that babies learn to speak the language of their parents.

This implicitly arrived-at level of cultural competence tends not to be a problem so long as one interacts only with other members of one's own culture (or subculture). However, when one begins to interact with members of other cultures one is all-too-likely to find oneself in a situation in which cultural differences between people lead to misunderstandings and conflict. Such conflict is less likely if one is aware of the ways in which one's own culture affects the way one views the world. In other words, if one is culturally competent, one is likely to be better able to communicate with

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to improve communication with those from other cultures (after http://www.air.org/cecp/cultural/Q_integrated.htm#def). The ability to be culturally competent is important for anyone who comes into contact with those from other cultural traditions (which includes most Americans in the 21st century) but is especially important in certain settings, including healthcare and education. Davis (1997) defines cultural competence within a healthcare setting in the following way: Operationally defined, cultural competence is the integration and transformation of knowledge about individuals and groups of people into specific standards, policies, practices, and attitudes used in appropriate cultural settings to increase the quality of services; thereby producing better outcomes. Cultural Competence and Medical Care The importance of cultural competence in the arena of healthcare is (obviously) especially vital given that the decisions made by healthcare professionals can have profoundly important consequences for others. Anne Fadiman has written a compelling account of cultural incompetence in her book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and The Collision of Two Cultures (http://www.amsa.org/prog

Category: Philosophy - C