The challenges of integrating cultural competence into undergraduate medical curricula across Europe: experience from the C2ME “Culturally competent in medical education” project

Abstract

Providing high quality care to socially and culturally diverse populations is challenging. Many organizations concerned with quality and equity in health care have called for physician training in cross cultural communication as one strategy for ensuring patient-centered health care for all, but little is known about how to effectively and sustainably integrate such teaching into the medical school curriculum.The C2ME "Culturally Competent in Medical Education" is a European project whose aim was to contribute to the integration of cultural competence teaching in undergraduate medical curricula across Europe. In order to foster exchange among medical schools about cultural competence training, C2ME organized a symposium at the 2014 European Association for Communication in Health Care (EACH) conference. The symposium highlighted the variety of teaching approaches and methods that are used to teach cultural competence as well as the the institutional challenges that make integration of cultural competence into the curricula difficult. There is a need for greater exchange of experiences and best practices among European medical schools to overcome these challenges.

How to integrate cultural competence in medical curricula: learning from a new medical programme

“…Reflecting the research findings above, Hudelson et al (2016) explained that integrating cultural competence in medical curricula has been patchy, while Sorensen et al (2019) further documented this gap by constructing a new instrument, influenced by TACCT (Tool of Assessing Cultural Competence Training), to measure cultural competence in 12 medical programmes across Europe. The instrument consisted of 19 questions organised under three main domains: learning outcomes (curriculum), allocation of resources and structures, support and policies.…”

“…Teaching cultural competence in medical education has been a challenge for many medical programmes (Hudelson, 2016). Echoing such challenge, Worden and Tiouririne (2018) published their experience entitled "cultural competence and curricular design: learning the hard way" and described how their students had negatively reacted towards the steps to incorporate cultural diversity in medical education.…”

Editorial: Diversity in Medical Education

“…Medical schools often aim to target exclusion and oppression such as sexual harassment, heterosexism, and racism, and struggle to transform university cultures and lift biases (18). Ultimately, schools strive for interactional diversity with positive interactions between students and staff with diverse background (14).…”

Cultural competence in medical education: A questionnaire study of Danish medical teachers’ perceptions of and preparedness to teach cultural competence

“…While cultural competence has long been an important topic in the fields of medical education in the US and Canada [14,19-21], its development in Europe has been somewhat slower. While there are some initiatives to incorporate cultural competence training in medical education programmes across Europe, this development is not structured, and the diverse approaches used are not very well documented [22]. Some European countries, including the UK and the Netherlands, have incorporated statements about cultural competence training in their national guidelines on medical education [21,23].…”