Track 1-2
Clinical

Cultural Competence in Health Care Delivery: An Administrator/Clinician Perspective

Health professionals are serving an increasingly diverse patient population in the United States. Because of the lack of racial and ethnic proportional representation among health care providers, it is increasingly common for a cultural, language, and ethnic mismatch to occur during the clinical encounter. When providers and systems of care have cultural "blinders", these encounters can be fraught with misunderstanding, misperception, and bias, which can lead to misdiagnosis, poor therapeutic alliance and poor outcomes. However, culturally informed providers and systems can greatly diminish these pitfalls and enhance their skills in healing even when a common language is not shared between the provider and the patient. This presentation will illustrate these points through the use of brief case discussions. A suggested framework to begin the process of self and community discovery for clinicians will be discussed. Implications for clinical work, research, and service delivery will be offered.

Henry Chung, MD
Medical Director
Chinatown Health Clinic
125 Walker Street, Second Floor
New York, N.Y. 10013
Phone: (212) 226-8866 Ext. 315
Fax: (212) 226-2289

Dr. Chung is Medical Director of the Chinatown Health Clinic in Chinatown, NY and the Asian Health Center of Flushing in Queens. He trained as a psychiatrist at The New York Hospital Westchester Division/Cornell Medical Center. Currently, he is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at NYU Medical Center where he teaches the psychosocial curriculum to primary care internal medicine residents at its NYU affiliate, New York Downtown Hospital. He has published several articles related to his cross-cultural clinical work and is currently involved in research on, and clinical work related to, the integration of primary care and behavioral health.   NEXT >

essentials | models and practices | policy | legal issues | networking
table of contents | contact us | who we are

These pages are sponsored by the HHS Health Care Financing Administration.
Copyright © 1998, DiversityRx; www.diversityRx.org, Last update:January 20, 2000

 Diversity Rx is sponsored by: