Cultural Competency Training in Medical Education: Adopting a Multipronged Approach to Overcome Challenges

Abstract

The domain of cultural competency in medical education deals with the varied cultural backgrounds and specific needs of different patients who are accessing health-care delivery services. The training in cultural competency imparted to medical students augments their knowledge and makes them aware of the presence and role of cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity in heterogeneous population groups. It is quite essential that training of medical students to become culturally competent must be conducted across all professional years of training in a longitudinal manner. Even though there are multiple benefits of training medical students in the domain of cultural competency, once we plan and implement such training, there can be multiple challenges. In conclusion, as medical education continues to evolve to meet the health-related needs of diverse population groups, cultural competency has to be acknowledged as one of the foundational pillars in empowering future cohorts of health-care professionals to deliver inclusive and culturally sensitive patient-centered medical care. The need of the hour is to identify the potential challenges in its successful implementation and then adopt a multipronged approach to effectively respond to them.

Keywords

• cultural competence
• health-care delivery
• medical education
• patients