Building organizational cultural competence

This half-day workshop is intended to move participants from understanding the core problems in providing culturally competent care to getting executive buy-in and organizational action. Offered by Critical Measures, LLC. a premier national training and consulting firm specializing in diversity training and cultural competence in health care, this seminar has attracted rave reviews from health care executives, managers and clinicians throughout the Upper Midwest. (In 2007, Critical Measures was asked to present this workshop in a full-day format for the Wisconsin Hospital Association.)

The session begins with an understanding of three core "megatrends" (race, immigration and limited english proficiency). Properly understood, cultural competence involves three key issues related to these underlying megatrends: 1) racial and ethnic disparities in health care; 2) cross-cultural value differences between immigrant patients and Western medical providers and 3) providing language access to LEP populations. From there, participants are exposed to the business, medical (quality/safety) and legal "cases" for cultural competence in health care - a presentation strategically tailored to gain executive buy-in. To assure that the session is highly interactive, participants will take a quiz on the legal and risk management issues pertaining to the provision of language access services to LEP and disabled patients. A discussion of emerging trends and national best practices rounds out the first part of the presentation.

Next, participants will play BARNGA, a card-game that doubles as a cross-cultural simulation. From there we will discuss ten core cross-cultural differences that can make a difference in cross-cultural patient and workforce interactions, define cultural competence as a function of four key elements (cross-cultural awareness, knowledge, skills and practice), discuss the emerging "science of bias" and how unconscious attitudes towards differences affect clinical decision-making and racial and ethnic disparities and proscribe a set of critical cross-cultural skills for the culturally competent manager and clinician.

We then provide more in-depth training on one of the skills in the skill set - namely, the skill of resolving cross-cultural conflict. Participants will complete the Intercultural Conflict Style (ICS) Assessment Inventory, an internationally normed, statistically validated instrument designed to assist them to understand how their personal conflict style compares to those of other cultures throughout the world. Participants will learn how to use the ICS Model to resolve cross-cultural conflict.

To complete the training, we next explain how to get action on an organizational level by conducting both a cultural competence organizational assessment (focused on the systems, policies and practices of providing culturally responsive care and language access to culturally diverse patients) as well as a workforce diversity audit. Included in this discussion will be suggestions as to how organizations can compare physicians' practice behaviors against national best practices in cross-cultural medicine and improve their analysis of patient satisfaction data by breaking out the data according to both race and language status. A process will then be described for turning organizational findings into organizational action via the construction of a strategic organizational cultural competence plan.