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Healthcare access in poor minority communities is limited by a lack of health
professionals with the skills to effectively communicate with the
patients they serve. In response, the Department of Health and
Human Services created national standards for culturally and
linguistically appropriate services in 2000. The standards were designed to
address the needs of racial, ethnic, and linguistic population groups that
experience unequal access to health services. The national standards set
up a helpful model for cultural competence. But health professionals need help
identifying the skills required to serve their patients and the means to add
those skills. Groups such as the National Center for
Cultural Competence, Cross Cultural Health Care Program and Diversity
Rx provide information on federal and state laws, tools to identify
cultural competence problems, and actions health professionals can take to
solve those problems.
Groups focused on specific aspects of the cultural competence also exist. For
example, Hablamos
Juntos and the National Center for Farmworker
Health provide health professionals with tools to communicate effectively
with people who speak Spanish. More resources on cultural competence are
available from the National Center for
Cultural Healing and the Center for Healthy Families and
Cultural Diversity
While cultural competence resources exist to help health professionals
communicate with patients, few resources have been created to help patients
communicate with health professionals.
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