Chapter 7: Exploring Themes of Culture in a Medical School Cultural Competence Course

This chapter examines the impact of cultural competency training on clinicians and the care they provide. This chapter analyzes over 70 reflection essays from a teaching course on cultural competence in medical education and practice collected over the past 12 years. This chapter first describes the structure, materials, and teaching methods of the course in which students were instructed to analyze a problem in their field that relates to cultural competency in medicine; then suggests strategies for solutions. Secondly, this chapter reports a meta-analysis of the data summarizing and explaining important themes relevant to instructing cultural competence in medical education including race, ethnicity, language, age, nationality, gender, socioeconomics, and discrimination.