GLOBAL AGILITY FOR THE MEDICAL SECTOR

Cultural Competence educational programs aim to prevent medical misdiagnoses and errors due to a lack of cultural understanding. They do so by adding to a practitioner's knowledge about the cultures they encounter. However, with the increasing diversity of domestic and global patients and personnel in the United States, Cultural Competence was not serving the needs of all medical professionals. How of the world's 5,000+ cultures can one "know"?

"Cultural humility" is a term coined by Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-Garcia in 1998 to describe a way of incorporating multiculturalism into their work as healthcare professionals. Designed to replace knowledge-based Cultural Competency, they focused Cultural Humility on self-reflection and lifelong learning.

Per the Wiki article, Cultural humility is the "ability to maintain an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented (or open to the other) in relation to aspects of cultural identity that are most important to the [person]." Cultural humility is different from other culturally-based training ideals because it focuses on self-humility rather than achieving a state of knowledge or awareness."

SO, CULTURAL HUMILITY IS LARGELY AN ATTITUDE.

It is a better attitude than the I-am-an-expert-in-your-culture, but, at its base, it is just an attitude. How does one practice it? To answer that question, people are adding many practical suggestions to Cultural Humility.