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.
- 30 -
News for
the week of
March 27
– April 1
