Several models of service care delivery have emerged to meet the challenges of providing health care to our growing multi-ethnic world. This article will present Campinha-Bacote's model of cultural competence in health care delivery: The Process of Cultural Competence in the Delivery of Healthcare Services. This model views cultural competence as the ongoing process in which the health care pro...

The growing concern with cultural competency in health care settings is an ironic development from the perspective of tribal health care, where biomedical clinicians and patients have struggled for decades with the challenges of cross-cultural healing.1 Both anthropological and other literatures on minority health have declared cultural competency to be a critical tool requiring both cross-cult...

Major health care problems such as patient dissatisfaction, inequity of access to care, and spiraling costs no longer seem amenable to traditional biomedical solutions. Concepts derived from anthropologic and cross-cultural research may provide an alternative framework for identifying issues that require resolution. A limited set of such concepts is described as illustrated, including a fundame...

Grooming behaviours are thought to be a crucial aspect of parenting and integral to the sociality of non-human mammals, but there have been few empirical studies on how grooming might be relevant to parenting and socialization processes in humans. Study 1 is a quantitative cross-cultural comparison of grooming practices in two cultural settings: an urban centre in Burma (Myanmar) and an urban c...

There are many examples of health care organizations that have morphed from the culture of low expectation to the culture of excellence. Ethically, to not drive to excellence means that we are settling from knowingly allowing harm to happen on our watch. The leader's obligation is to create that sonic boom that Black and Gregersen (2008) describe to break up the old mind maps, to create the mov...

We fully support Bisognano and Schummers’s well presented and timely article.1 The 2002 Wanless report made us realise that without a change in approach the NHS would become financially challenged and that we needed a way to engage patients. We decided to use an evidence based, patient centred approach to enable patients with long term conditions to take control of their health through shared d...

This case study aimed to interpret the underlying historical and cultural aspects of the provision of care at an indigenous healthcare service facility. This is an interpretive, case study-type research with qualitative approach, which was conducted in 2012 at the Indigenous Health Support Center (CASAI) of the State of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Data were collected by means systematic observa...

BACKGROUND although there is a wealth of information available about quality improvement tools and techniques in healthcare there is little understanding about overcoming the challenges of day-to-day implementation in complex organisations like hospitals. The 'Quality and Safety in Europe by Research' (QUASER) study will investigate how hospitals implement, spread and sustain quality improvemen...