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Cultural diversity: blind spot in medical curriculum documents, a document analysis

BACKGROUND: Cultural diversity among patients presents specific challenges to physicians. Therefore, cultural diversity training is needed in medical education. In cases where strategic curriculum documents form the basis of medical training it is expected that the topic of cultural diversity is inc...

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Autores principales: Paternotte, Emma, Fokkema, Joanne PI, van Loon, Karsten A, van Dulmen, Sandra, Scheele, Fedde
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4236597/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25150546
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6920-14-176
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author Paternotte, Emma
Fokkema, Joanne PI
van Loon, Karsten A
van Dulmen, Sandra
Scheele, Fedde
author_facet Paternotte, Emma
Fokkema, Joanne PI
van Loon, Karsten A
van Dulmen, Sandra
Scheele, Fedde
author_sort Paternotte, Emma
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Cultural diversity among patients presents specific challenges to physicians. Therefore, cultural diversity training is needed in medical education. In cases where strategic curriculum documents form the basis of medical training it is expected that the topic of cultural diversity is included in these documents, especially if these have been recently updated. The aim of this study was to assess the current formal status of cultural diversity training in the Netherlands, which is a multi-ethnic country with recently updated medical curriculum documents. METHODS: In February and March 2013, a document analysis was performed of strategic curriculum documents for undergraduate and postgraduate medical education in the Netherlands. All text phrases that referred to cultural diversity were extracted from these documents. Subsequently, these phrases were sorted into objectives, training methods or evaluation tools to assess how they contributed to adequate curriculum design. RESULTS: Of a total of 52 documents, 33 documents contained phrases with information about cultural diversity training. Cultural diversity aspects were more prominently described in the curriculum documents for undergraduate education than in those for postgraduate education. The most specific information about cultural diversity was found in the blueprint for undergraduate medical education. In the postgraduate curriculum documents, attention to cultural diversity differed among specialties and was mainly superficial. CONCLUSIONS: Cultural diversity is an underrepresented topic in the Dutch documents that form the basis for actual medical training, although the documents have been updated recently. Attention to the topic is thus unwarranted. This situation does not fit the demand of a multi-ethnic society for doctors with cultural diversity competences. Multi-ethnic countries should be critical on the content of the bases for their medical educational curricula.
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spelling pubmed-42365972014-11-19 Cultural diversity: blind spot in medical curriculum documents, a document analysis Paternotte, Emma Fokkema, Joanne PI van Loon, Karsten A van Dulmen, Sandra Scheele, Fedde BMC Med Educ Research Article BACKGROUND: Cultural diversity among patients presents specific challenges to physicians. Therefore, cultural diversity training is needed in medical education. In cases where strategic curriculum documents form the basis of medical training it is expected that the topic of cultural diversity is included in these documents, especially if these have been recently updated. The aim of this study was to assess the current formal status of cultural diversity training in the Netherlands, which is a multi-ethnic country with recently updated medical curriculum documents. METHODS: In February and March 2013, a document analysis was performed of strategic curriculum documents for undergraduate and postgraduate medical education in the Netherlands. All text phrases that referred to cultural diversity were extracted from these documents. Subsequently, these phrases were sorted into objectives, training methods or evaluation tools to assess how they contributed to adequate curriculum design. RESULTS: Of a total of 52 documents, 33 documents contained phrases with information about cultural diversity training. Cultural diversity aspects were more prominently described in the curriculum documents for undergraduate education than in those for postgraduate education. The most specific information about cultural diversity was found in the blueprint for undergraduate medical education. In the postgraduate curriculum documents, attention to cultural diversity differed among specialties and was mainly superficial. CONCLUSIONS: Cultural diversity is an underrepresented topic in the Dutch documents that form the basis for actual medical training, although the documents have been updated recently. Attention to the topic is thus unwarranted. This situation does not fit the demand of a multi-ethnic society for doctors with cultural diversity competences. Multi-ethnic countries should be critical on the content of the bases for their medical educational curricula. BioMed Central 2014-08-22 /pmc/articles/PMC4236597/ /pubmed/25150546 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6920-14-176 Text en Copyright © 2014 Paternotte et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Paternotte, Emma
Fokkema, Joanne PI
van Loon, Karsten A
van Dulmen, Sandra
Scheele, Fedde
Cultural diversity: blind spot in medical curriculum documents, a document analysis
title Cultural diversity: blind spot in medical curriculum documents, a document analysis
title_full Cultural diversity: blind spot in medical curriculum documents, a document analysis
title_fullStr Cultural diversity: blind spot in medical curriculum documents, a document analysis
title_full_unstemmed Cultural diversity: blind spot in medical curriculum documents, a document analysis
title_short Cultural diversity: blind spot in medical curriculum documents, a document analysis
title_sort cultural diversity: blind spot in medical curriculum documents, a document analysis
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4236597/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25150546
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1472-6920-14-176
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