Background: Increasing the cultural competence of physicians and other health care providers has been suggested as one mechanism for reducing health disparities by improving the quality of care across racial/ethnic groups. While cultural competency training for physicians is increasingly promoted, relatively few studies evaluating the impact of training have been published.

While cultural competency is widely promoted, the lack of a measure of cultural competency limits our ability to evaluate interventions and to understand the effects of cultural competency on health care quality. Based on a conceptual framework of cultural competency derived from expert focus groups, we developed a patient-reported measure of physician culturally competent communication behaviors that we validated in a group of 429 adult primary-care patients with diabetes and/or hypertension and their 53 physicians. Construct validity was supported by a moderate association with both patient satisfaction (r = .32, p < .001) and patient trust (r = .53, p < .001). Predictive validity was supported by an association with a decrease in blood pressure among hypertensive patients (r = -.18; p < .05). This new measure may be useful in assessing levels of culturally competent provider behavior and investigating associations between provider cultural competency and health care processes and outcomes.

No abstract

No abstract