The Evaluation of Cultural Competence in Healthcare

Abstract

The article seeks to stimulate dialogue about the evaluation of cultural competence in healthcare. The first part of the paper presents the different attempts to measure cultural competence in the field of healthcare and critically analyses the problems that arise concerning the use of instruments that measure the cultural competence of health providers. The second part of the article focuses on the evaluation process of the first cultural competence educational programme for healthcare workers in Slovenia, serving as an example to demonstrate the importance of complementing quantitative methods with qualitative ones and to emphasize the need to shift the focus from measuring the cultural competence of individual healthcare workers to the evaluation of educator performances, patient perspectives, and the cultural competence of healthcare institutions as a whole.

Keywords

• cultural competence
• healthcare
• education
• evaluation
• qualitative and quantitative methods