by Jennifer Kowalewski

Josepha Campinha-Bacote, Ph.D., will speak to OU-COM students about the importance of health-care professionals being culturally competent during her presentation, “A Cultural Conscious Approach to Health Care Delivery,” Monday, April 3, at noon in Irvine Hall 194. She will discuss the skills needed for medical students to become proficient at completing cultural assessments of their patients.

Campinha-Bacote opens the Minority Health Month lecture series, which is sponsored by the Center of Excellence for Multicultural Medicine and the Office of Student Affairs. Created April 1989 by mandate of the Ohio General Assembly, Minority Health Month is a 30-day, high visibility health promotion and disease prevention campaign. Ohio University E. W. Scripps School of Journalism Associate Professor Eddith Dashiell, Ph.D., will deliver a lecture titled “The Poorest of the Poor: Culture and Medicine in El Salvador” Wednesday, April 5.

“The center and student affairs are very excited this year to have a number of new speakers to help celebrate Minority Health Month,” says Pat Burnett, Ph.D., director of student affairs. “Although April is identified as Minority Health Month, the material covered in these sessions is relevant to health-care practitioners throughout their education and practice.”

Campinha-Bacote founded Transcultural C.A.R.E. Associates to provide clinical, administrative, research and educational services related to transcultural health care and mental health issues. She has several degrees, including a doctorate in nursing from the University of Virginia. She recently graduated from the Cincinnati Christian University with a master of art in religion and received an M.S.N. degree in nursing from Texas Women’s University. She holds, among several faculty appointments, a clinical assistant professorship at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

“My presentation will focus on developing cultural ‘skill’ — which is the ability to do a cultural assessment,” says Campinha-Bacote, president of Transcultural C.A.R.E. Associates. “Cultural assessments are for all patients, not just for ones who are different from you.”

She believes that in schools, whether medical or nursing, students are taught that culture has to do with the color of someone’s skin. But culture is beyond what a person looks like. Culture has to do with values, beliefs and practices, she says.

“I look very ethnic, and health-care professionals will complete a cultural assessment on people who look like me. But when they see someone with blond hair and blue eyes, they don’t think cultural assessment.

“People with blond hair and blue-eyes are just as much cultural beings as anyone.”

Cultural skill is just one of five constructs encompassing cultural competence. The others are cultural awareness, cultural knowledge, cultural encounter and cultural desire. Campinha-Bacote says she will discuss all five, which comprise her “culturally competent model of care.”

She outlines her model, which has been taught nationwide at more than 200 health-care institutions in “The Process of Cultural Competence in the Delivery of Healthcare Services.” Her model, she says, defines cultural competence as “the process in which the health-care professional continually strives to achieve the ability and availability to effectively work within the cultural context of a client (family, individual or community).”

Campinha-Bacote says her model blends disciplines from other models and can be integrated into multidisciplinary areas such as nursing, medical schools, pharmacology and dentistry programs.

Cultural awareness, she says, is the process of self-examining one’s own bias toward other cultures. Cultural knowledge is the process for health-care professionals to seek information in order to have a worldview of different cultures and ethnic groups. Cultural skill helps health-care professionals complete an assessment by collecting relevant data regarding a patient’s cultural background. Cultural encounter encourages health-care professionals to engage in face-to-face cultural interactions. Cultural desire is the motivation of professionals to want to engage in awareness, knowledge, skill and encounter.

Campinha-Bacote is the first of six lecturers during Minority Health Month. The month is designed to promote healthy lifestyles and provide information for the successful practice of disease prevention. The month also highlights the disparate health conditions between Ohio’s minority and majority populations and advances an agenda that encourages the improvement of the health status of minorities year round. The Ohio Commission on Minority Health, created in 1987 by the General Assembly, supports activities throughout the state, such as guest lecturers.

Dashiell will speak about her work with SEDINFA, a mission in El Salvador, which loosely translated, she says, means the “center for inter-development of children and family.” Dashiell holds a doctorate in mass communication from the University of Indiana and a master’s degree in history from Middle Tennessee State University. She also is assistant provost for multicultural graduate affairs.

She spent time in El Salvador in August and December and has plans to return in July to work with the center. She wants the students at OU-COM to realize how even those in the Appalachian region are far better off then those living in El Salvador. She encountered children who had never had milk or had ever seen a dentist.

“I want the students to realize that as physicians they may encounter kids who never have had a really well-balanced, nutritious meal in their life,” Dashiell says, asking how can a doctor tell patients to get more vitamins in their diet when they are so poor; they are just attempting to survive.

“I want students to understand the importance of being culturally sensitive. How can you tell a patient to drink more milk when they can’t afford milk?” Medical students should keep these thoughts in the back of their mind, especially if they intend on practicing within poorer communities or countries.

Burnett says the college has emphasized cultural sensitivity while training osteopathic students to become osteopathic physicians.

“I have been impressed with our students’ desire to learn about health disparities and cultural practices in relation to health care, and I think they will be pleased with this month’s series,” says Burnett.

Dashiell also will speak in Irvine Hall 194 from noon to 1 p.m. William Anderson, D.O., past president of the American Osteopathic Association, will speak April 17 at 5 p.m. Ohio University Associate Professor Richard Greenlee, Ph.D., Department of Social Work, will speak on “Appalachian Cultural Competence” in Grosvenor West 111, April 18. Cora Munoz, Ph.D., Department of Nursing at Capital University, will speak April 26, and the final speaker in the series will be Ronald Myers, M.D., founder, president and medical director of Myers Foundation Christian Family Health Centers. Myers will present “The Challenge of Providing Health Care to the Poor” April 28.

Unless otherwise noted, all presentations are from noon to 1 p.m. in Irvine 194.