The purpose of this website is to provide you with tools and knowledge that will help inform your encounters with patients from different cultures. Please note that culture and the effects it has on interpersonal interactions is influenced by a broad spectrum of individual and social qualities, such as race, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, class, gender, and socioeconomic status. While none of these cultural contributors stands alone in determining a patient’s “culture,” each one distinctly shapes the individual patient and the interactions you will have with him/her.

For the purposes of this website, we are focusing only on selected racial and ethnic groups and how these backgrounds can contribute to the clinical encounter. In the future, we plan both to expand and to refine the coverage of cultural competence for additional groups.

The key to using this website is to understand that it equips you not with answers, but questions. By providing the framework for understanding cultural tendencies – both your own as well as individual patient’s – we have outlined appropriate questions to ask and issues to consider to offer the best quality of health care to your patients.

This website is divided into five main parts:

1. General Recommendations – Clinical pearls, information on using an interpreter, literacy concerns, and universal clinical encounter considerations.
    
2. Background – basic background information on cultural competence, dimensions of culture, and specific cultural information.
    
3. Special Populations – generalizations that can be helpful to consider when interaction with patients from specific populations.
    
4. Case Studies – four case studies concerning patients from special populations.
    
5. Resources – a list of links and resources to consult if you wish to learn more.

This Website was developed as part of the mission of the Chronic Disease Prevention and Control Research Center:

“To improve health and well being of citizens in the United States and abroad through biobehavioral and public health research, consumer and health care provider education, and innovative outreach strategies.”

Continue to General Recommendations