CULTURAL COMPETENCIES IN HEALTH CARE INTERVIEWING

Purpose: The health history interview is a fundamental opportunity for a clinician to establish a trusting and supportive relationship with the patient, as well as to gather and offer information. During the interview, the clinician calls upon many interpersonal skills that will ultimately improve the well-being of the patient. In the US, health care providers interact with patients and their families who may be from different cultures. Each culture comes with its own traditions, languages and spiritual backgrounds, and thus cultural competence becomes a key interpersonal skill for the health care professional to provide adequate medical care to all patients. Our goal was to develop a plan for health care providers to become culturally competent and be able to use these skills to decrease the cultural gap between themselves and their patients. Methods: We identified various resources that could be used to improve cultural competency in the healthcare workforce and categorized these resources into those for interpersonal or intrapersonal use. Intrapersonal resources play a role in promoting self-awareness and education of the individual in regards to other cultures. Interpersonal resources function as mediation tools to facilitate the medical care process by shortening the cultural gap. Results: A simple two-step method encompassing the identification of resources and implementing them appropriately can enhance both cultural education as well as facilitate the interviewing process, and therefore positively impact health care. Conclusions: Cultural competency can be largely improved upon by making use of different resources available to medical care professionals. In the end, the ultimate goal is a health care system that can provide the highest level of care to every patient, regardless of ethnicity, English proficiency, and background.