Culturally Speaking: The Bureau of Cultural Competence’s Curriculum Training Website
OMH News; Hextor Pabon, Education and Training Coordinator, Bureau of Cultural Competence
The Bureau of Cultural Competence (BCC) is proud to present its website called the Research Topics and Presentations from Centers of Excellence. This “Learning Units” web page was created to support the work function of the BCC to reduce behavioral health disparities through training and technical support, as well as support the New York State Office of Mental Health’s (OMH) vision to work toward a more effective public mental health system, which values recovery, hope, excellence, respect, and safety.
To accomplish OMH’s vision, the BCC works in collaboration with Centers of Excellence for Cultural Competence (CECC). OMH designated the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research (NKI) in Orangeburg, NY and the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) in New York City as CECC Centers. The CECC is legislatively (2007) charged to identify, assess the outcome, and disseminate best practices of demonstrated behaviors, attitudes, policies and structures that work effectively cross-culturally across modalities of care. The BCC works in collaboration with the CECCs who are responsible for the advancement of research for people of color and underserved populations.
The Learning Unit Categories are listed below:
Cultural Competence Basics: The set of talks in this unit are intended for persons not yet familiar with the underlying premises of cultural competency, its definition, its system-wide relevance and importance to the reduction of access, utilization, and outcome disparities.
Organizational Infrastructure: NYS OMH-operated facilities are required to address the cultural and linguistic diversity of their populations and document these activities in Cultural Competency (CC) Plans. In this series of talks, organizational characteristics, including policies and procedures related to cultural and linguistic competency, and facility environments are described. A scale for assessing organizations on their CC activities is presented, which provides a roadmap for creating the CC Plans. In addition, instructions on entering cultural data from intake interviews in the data systems used in these facilities are discussed.
Understanding Cultural Populations: The first step in providing culturally competent care is to understand which cultures the patient population served by the clinical service identifies with. This series of presentations will focus on identifying the most common racial/ethnic/cultural groups treated by OMH and how OMH data sets can be used to identify the racial/ethnic/cultural groups in the patient population.
Cultural Competency and Clinical Care: This seminar series presents methods for assessing patients’ cultural backgrounds and cultural views about illness in a clinical setting. We discuss the inclusion of cultural assessment in the DSM-5, including through the Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI), a 16-item questionnaire designed to elicit information about a patient’s culture and how it influences treatment. The inclusion of culture in other aspects of DSM-5, such as disorder criteria, is also reviewed. We present tools for assessing cultural competency at the program level and a toolkit for adapting evidence-based treatments to the culture of the population served. We also discuss some examples in which treatments have been adapted to the needs of cultural groups, and some risks of not examining cultural influences, including the risk of misdiagnosis.
Engagement: Ensuring that consumers are engaged in treatment (for example, communicating with the clinician and adhering with treatment recommendations) is essential to providing quality mental health services. This seminar series examines mechanisms to promote engagement in mental health treatment among patients from diverse cultural groups, discusses the role of stigma in consumer disengagement, and offers examples of interventions that have been shown to be well-received and effective (for example, spirituality groups and fotonovelas).
Health Reform: New York State has initiated health care system changes in compliance with mandates found in the Federal Patient Protection Affordable Care Act that will lead to transformations in the organization and delivery of mental health care services. Ensuring the cultural competence of the emerging service models is particularly important for persons with behavioral health care disorders, as their engagement and retention in care may be unnecessarily impeded if cultural accommodations are not included. Given the growing diversity of the population of NYS, cultural competency needs to be at the forefront of reform activities. These talks discuss some ways to ensure the goals of cultural competency are met in health care reform efforts.
Access: Disparities in access to mental health care among vulnerable populations have been well documented. This seminar series proposes some innovative ways to improve access for vulnerable populations, including the use of care managers to help facilitate treatment, innovative ways to conduct interpreter-mediated care that emphasizes the cultural brokering aspect of verbal interpreting, and the engagement of community organizations, including religious and spiritual organizations, to disseminate information about mental health treatment resources to their communities.
Culture, Consumer Voice, and Recovery: This seminar series will provide some examples of innovative outreach and treatment strategies targeted to specific cultural groups, including suicide prevention strategies aimed at Latina adolescents and innovations in engaging diverse populations in supported education and employment. We will also examine some innovative activities to activate patients from diverse groups in their treatment, for example via an intervention in which a care manager coaches patients in how to formulate questions of their clinicians, and the use of Photovoice, a qualitative research design in which consumers are asked to document their thoughts with cameras, as it may be easier to use photos to illustrate concepts that they may have difficulty verbalizing.
Culture and Age Cycles: This series of presentations focuses on different age groups within cultural groups. Views of mental illness, values that impact mental health service use, help-seeking behaviors, and barriers to services will vary across the age cycle. The goals of these presentations are to consider and advance understanding about the differences across the lifespan and to promote innovative and engaging culturally competent approaches to working with these groups.
Special Cultural Groups: We define a cultural group in the context of mental health treatment as a group whose cultural characteristics (including views of stigmatization) complicate active participation in decision making. While Cultural Competency most frequently refers to groups defined by race and ethnicity, and/or by language needs, other groups present challenges as well.
The BCC is in the process of posting 14 new training videos that were recorded in 2013-2014. In 2014-2015, the BCC will schedule and post 14 new training videos that will include specific topics on refugee cultures, military culture of veterans, and children.
The BCC utilizes behavioral health experts and organizations both within and outside of New York State to provide education and training resources that support the OMH vision that infuses cultural and linguistic competency in this endeavor. Any Comments or questions about the information in this article can be directed to Hextor Pabon.
http://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/resources/newsltr/2014/Mar/culturally-speaking.html
visit the research topics website here: http://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/cultural_competence/learning_curriculum.html