AN EXAMINATION OF INSTRUMENTS THAT MEASURE CULTURALLY COMPETENT NURSING CARE
Cultural competency training is being widely promoted as a means to improve the quality of health care for ethnic minorities. However, relatively little work has been done to develop a valid and reliable measure of cultural competency or to investigate the relationship between cultural competence and the quality of health care. (p. 1)
Indeed, Lipson, Demi, Blaney, Stern, Schultz and Lenburg (2000) report that the notion of cultural competence has been applied to health care in almost every area of medicine. These include clinical areas such as diabetes education; critical care, and transplantation. Developmental and life-cycle areas such as physician-patient relationship in pediatrics and adolescent health, work with young children and families, care of the elderly and even parent-child relationships are, according to the authors, also being approached using cultural competence models.
Lipson et. al (2000) also report that cultural competence theories and models have been applied to psychiatric services including treatment programs for partner abuse and drug abuse, the patient-therapist relationship, and child and adolescent psychiatric residency training . Further, these models have been strongly emphasized in terms of the need to arrive at a proper ethnic and cognitive match between therapist and patient in psychotherapy and counseling.
Other areas that Lipson et. al (2000) report as increasingly being examined in terms of cultural competence include: health services management; managed care; measurement of quality in managed care organizations; medical ethics; family practice; refugee health; primary care for women; public health; and lesbian and gay health.
Given the promotion of cultural competency training and theory in so many diverse areas of the health care field, it seems reasonable to state that it is important to have some soli...