Cultural competence in healthcare

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Cultural competence in healthcare refers to the ability for healthcare professionals to demonstrate cultural competence toward patients with diverse values, beliefs, and feelings.^[1][2] This process includes consideration of the individual social, cultural, and psychological needs of patients for effective cross-cultural communication with their health care providers.^[3] The goal of cultural competence in health care is to reduce health disparities and to provide optimal care to patients regardless of their race, gender, ethnic background, native languages spoken, and religious or cultural beliefs. Cultural competency training is important in health care fields where human interaction is common, including medicine, nursing, allied health, mental health, social work, pharmacy, oral health, and public health fields.

The term cultural competence was first used by Terry L. Cross and colleagues in 1989,^[1] but it was not until almost a decade later that health care professionals began to be formally educated and trained in cultural competence. In 2002, cultural competence in health care emerged as a field^[4] and has been increasingly embedded into medical education curricula and taught in health settings around the world since then.^[5]