Journal Article

Cultural awareness workshops: limitations and practical consequences

Shepherd, Stephane M.

2019

Overview

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.

• Publisher: BioMed Central,BioMed Central Ltd,Springer Nature B.V,BMC
• Subject: Academic Language / Aggression / Approaches to teaching and learning / Behavioral medicine / Beliefs / Bias / Civil Rights Legislation / Clinical outcomes / Colonialism / Cross cultural training / Cultural Awareness / Cultural competence / Cultural differences / Cultural Education / Cultural humility / Cultural intelligence / Cultural safety / Cultural sensitivity / Debate / Diversity training / Education / Health care / Health care reform / Health disparities / Health Needs / Health Personnel / Health Promotion / Holistic Approach / Intellectual Disciplines / Intelligence / Medical Education / Medical personnel / Medical personnel training / Mental health / Methods / Minority & ethnic groups / Minority Groups / Multiculturalism / Multiculturalism & pluralism / Philosophy / Professionals / Psychology / Public health / Racism / Resistance (Psychology) / Systematic review / Teaching Methods / Theory of Medicine/Bioethics / Training / Underserved populations / Workshops