Health Professionals: Your Role in Women's Health

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Related information Minority Women's Health

Cultural Competence

Home > Health Professionals > Cultural Competence

• Cultural Responsiveness
• Ethnomedicine
• Female Migrant Workers' Health
• Homeless Women's Health
• Immigrant Women's Health

Cultural competence may sound abstract and perhaps not relevant to your daily work. However, consider one of the most serious and common diseases: diabetes. African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and other ethnic groups are more likely to develop diabetes. Some ethnic groups also metabolize medicine differently — meaning certain drugs, such as those for diabetes, may be more or less effective or require different dosages. And that’s just one example. Culture can affect all aspects of health care. For example:

• Diverse belief systems exist related to health, healing, and wellness.
• Culture influences help-seeking behaviors and attitudes toward health care professionals.
• Individual preferences affect traditional and nontraditional approaches to health care.
• Patients must overcome personal experiences of biases within health care systems.
• Health care professionals from culturally and linguistically diverse groups are under-represented in the current service delivery system.

Better communication with patients, families, and groups from diverse cultures, improved health outcomes, and greater patient satisfaction with care all are benefits derived from being a culturally competent health care professional. To help health professionals learn more about cultural diversity issues in health care, we link to resources on topics like ethnomedicine, female migrant workers’ health, homeless women’s health, and immigrant women’s health. We also provide links to a variety of resources on cultural responsiveness, which is how health professionals can put cultural competence into practice. Some of the U.S. federal government offices and agencies that focus on health disparities affecting women include:

• The Department of Health and Human Services' Office on Women's Health
• The Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Minority Health
• The National Institutes of Health's Office of Research on Women's Health
• The Health Resources and Services Administration's Maternal and Child Health Bureau

Content last updated December 1, 2008.