This paper seeks to contribute to critical reflection on the importance, dilemmas and problems that arise in educating health professionals about the socio-cultural dimensions of health and healthcare. In the first part of the paper the authors show that although educational programmes in the field of cultural competences have experienced a remarkable upswing, they are accompanied by many ambiguities and shortcomings. Based on numerous anthropological criticisms, the authors highlight the major conceptual and methodological problems that accompany many cultural competence efforts. The second part of the article focuses on an analysis of the multi-year process of introducing a training course in cultural competence in Slovenia, in which over 500 health professionals have been trained since 2016. Based on the results of the participants’ quantitative evaluation and educators’ self-evaluation, the authors critically analyse the contributions of this training course, while highlighting some of the key dilemmas and difficulties that have accompanied this process.

The article seeks to stimulate dialogue about the evaluation of cultural competence in healthcare. The first part of the paper presents the different attempts to measure cultural competence in the field of healthcare and critically analyses the problems that arise concerning the use of instruments that measure the cultural competence of health providers. The second part of the article focuses on the evaluation process of the first cultural competence educational programme for healthcare workers in Slovenia, serving as an example to demonstrate the importance of complementing quantitative methods with qualitative ones and to emphasize the need to shift the focus from measuring the cultural competence of individual healthcare workers to the evaluation of educator performances, patient perspectives, and the cultural competence of healthcare institutions as a whole.

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