Propelled by a national concern with social justice and health disparities, the notion of cultural competency is being incorporated into both government regulation and professional standards. Although most of the standards that are being developed nationally apply at the institutional level, it is in the clinical setting where the expectation of cultural competency is the most demanding. The re...

BACKGROUND Since the sixties of the last century, many people from Morocco and Turkey have migrated into the Netherlands. In the last decade, Moroccan and Turkish patients have found their way to organizations for mental health care. However, they often drop out of treatment. Problems in the communication with therapists and different expectations regarding treatment seem to be causal factors f...

A 50 year old African American woman presents with chest pain. She states that the pain has been intermittent for two weeks. She has not seen a regular physician for some time because she lost her insurance when she changed jobs a year ago. She has occasionally gone to an ER or local clinics to get prescriptions for her anti-hypertensive medicine, hydrochlorothiazide. She visited your ER a week...

According to the cultural trade-off hypothesis, individualism and collectivism entail inverse costs and benefits for the two dimensions of global self-esteem. Specifically, individualism is described as promoting the development of self-competence but inhibiting the development of self-liking. Collectivism is described as doing the opposite. To examine the hypothesis, Malaysian (collectivist) a...

BACKGROUND Cultural competency is now a core requirement for maternal health providers working in multicultural society. However, it has not yet received due attention in Ethiopia. This study aimed to determine the level of cultural competence and its associated factors among maternal health care providers in Bahir Dar City Administration, Northwest Ethiopia. METHODS Institution based cross-s...

This quasi-experimental study investigates the effects of an intensive intercultural service-learning program on the intercultural competence of undergraduate students by utilizing preand post-course assessments of intercultural competence as measured by the cultural intelligence (Van Dyne, Koh, & Ang, 2008) and intercultural sensitivity (Chen & Starosta, 2000) scales. The intercultural service...

The growth and development of competence by group H streptococci, strain Challis, were compared in synthetic, semisynthetic, and complex media with respect to the cultural conditions required, time of onset and persistence of competence and transformation efficiency. Provided that cultural conditions were strictly controlled in the synthetic system, transformation frequencies of 1% or above wer...

Existing models of competence development are characterised by a fixed sequence of stages of which assessment by others and following a fixed set of competence development activities are obligatory components. This paper shows that these models do not do justice to the large diversity of learning needs among lifelong learners. It then presents a model, consisting of four non-obligatory stages t...