Organizational cultural competence refers to the need to achieve cultural competence?within the health care leadership and workforce by maximizing diverse representation. These may be accomplished through:?

• Establishing programs for visible minority health care leadership development and strengthening already existing programs. The desired result is a core of professionals who may assume influential positions in academia, government, and private industry.

• Organizations should make it a priority to hire and promote minorities in the health care workforce.

• Community representatives should be formally or informally involved in the health care organization?s planning and evaluation of health care services.? Community participation is essential to address such initiatives as conducting community assessments, developing mechanisms for community and patient feedback, implementing systems for patient racial/ethnic and language preference data collection, developing quality measures for diverse patient populations, and ensuring culturally and linguistically appropriate health education materials and health promotion and disease prevention interventions.

• Making on-site cultural interpreter services available in health care settings where significant populations of second language speakers exist.

Clinical Cultural Competence

?In order to attain clinical cultural competence health care providers must:

(1)?? be made aware of the impact of social and cultural factors on health beliefs and behaviors;

(2)?? be equipped with the tools and skills to manage these factors appropriately through training and education; and

(3)?? empower their patients to be more of an active partner in the medical encounter. Organizations can do this through:

????????? cross-cultural training as a required, integrated component of the training and professional development of health care providers;

????????? quality improvement efforts that include culturally and linguistically appropriate patient survey methods and the development of process and outcome measures that reflect the needs of multicultural and minority populations; and

????????? programs to educate patients on how to navigate the health care system and become an active participant in their care.

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(4)?? The curricula should increase awareness of racial and ethnic disparities in health and the importance of socio-cultural factors on health beliefs and behaviors;

(5)?? The impact of race, ethnicity, culture, and class on clinical decision making should be studied in order to develop tools to assess the community members? health beliefs and behaviors and develop human resource skills for cross-cultural assessment, communication, and negotiation.

(6)?? Quality improvement efforts should include culturally and linguistically appropriate patient survey methods as well as process and outcome measures that reflect the needs of multicultural and minority populations.

???? (7) Programs should be developed to help patients navigate the health care?system and become a more active partner in the clinical encounter