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Cultural awareness workshops: limitations and practical consequences

Cultural awareness training for health professionals is now commonplace across a variety of sectors. Its popularity has spawned several alternatives (i.e., cultural competence, cultural safety, cultural humility, cultural intelligence) and overlapping derivatives (diversity training, anti-racism tra...

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Autor principal: Shepherd, Stephane M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6325797/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30621665
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-018-1450-5
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author Shepherd, Stephane M.
author_facet Shepherd, Stephane M.
author_sort Shepherd, Stephane M.
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description Cultural awareness training for health professionals is now commonplace across a variety of sectors. Its popularity has spawned several alternatives (i.e., cultural competence, cultural safety, cultural humility, cultural intelligence) and overlapping derivatives (diversity training, anti-racism training, micro-aggression training). The ever-increasing reach of cultural awareness initiatives in health settings has generally been well intentioned - to improve cross-cultural clinical encounters and patient outcomes with the broader expectation of reducing health disparities. Yet the capacity of cultural awareness training to accomplish or even impact such outcomes is seldom comprehensively scrutinized. In response, this paper applies a much needed critical lens to cultural awareness training and its derivatives by examining their underpinning philosophies, assumptions and most importantly, verification of their effectiveness. The paper finds cultural awareness approaches to be over-generalizing, simplistic and impractical. They may even induce unintended negative consequences. Decades of research point to their failure to realize meaningful outcomes in health care settings and beyond. Broader expectations of their capacity to reduce health disparities are almost certainly unachievable. Alternative suggestions for improving cross-cultural health care interactions and research are discussed within.
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spelling pubmed-63257972019-01-11 Cultural awareness workshops: limitations and practical consequences Shepherd, Stephane M. BMC Med Educ Debate Cultural awareness training for health professionals is now commonplace across a variety of sectors. Its popularity has spawned several alternatives (i.e., cultural competence, cultural safety, cultural humility, cultural intelligence) and overlapping derivatives (diversity training, anti-racism training, micro-aggression training). The ever-increasing reach of cultural awareness initiatives in health settings has generally been well intentioned - to improve cross-cultural clinical encounters and patient outcomes with the broader expectation of reducing health disparities. Yet the capacity of cultural awareness training to accomplish or even impact such outcomes is seldom comprehensively scrutinized. In response, this paper applies a much needed critical lens to cultural awareness training and its derivatives by examining their underpinning philosophies, assumptions and most importantly, verification of their effectiveness. The paper finds cultural awareness approaches to be over-generalizing, simplistic and impractical. They may even induce unintended negative consequences. Decades of research point to their failure to realize meaningful outcomes in health care settings and beyond. Broader expectations of their capacity to reduce health disparities are almost certainly unachievable. Alternative suggestions for improving cross-cultural health care interactions and research are discussed within. BioMed Central 2019-01-08 /pmc/articles/PMC6325797/ /pubmed/30621665 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-018-1450-5 Text en © The Author(s). 2019 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. 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 Debate
Shepherd, Stephane M.
Cultural awareness workshops: limitations and practical consequences
title Cultural awareness workshops: limitations and practical consequences
title_full Cultural awareness workshops: limitations and practical consequences
title_fullStr Cultural awareness workshops: limitations and practical consequences
title_full_unstemmed Cultural awareness workshops: limitations and practical consequences
title_short Cultural awareness workshops: limitations and practical consequences
title_sort cultural awareness workshops: limitations and practical consequences
topic Debate
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6325797/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30621665
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-018-1450-5
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