Advancing Racial/Ethnic and Cultural Sensitivity Among PMHNP Students Through Education, Practice, and Experience

Abstract

BACKGROUND: There is an increased need for mental health providers to be more attuned to behavioral health needs of racial/ethnic/cultural minorities and the role of social milieus. AIMS: We prioritized training and assessing racial/ethnic and cultural sensitivity among psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner students throughout coursework, clinical practice, and experiences in underserved settings. METHOD: Prior to beginning clinical coursework, students completed a course on culturally competent care where we measured their ( n = 26) perception of their ability to be racially/ethnically sensitive providers at the beginning and end of the semester, demonstrating significant improvement. During clinical coursework, preceptors measured students’ racially/ethnically and culturally sensitive clinical behaviors with patients. RESULTS: Sensitivity of students in clinical training significantly improved over a semester of clinical supervision. Our results indicated that placements in underserved settings improved students’ racial/ethnic/cultural sensitivity but only among advanced students. At final evaluation, advanced students in underserved settings self-reported significantly higher racial/ethnic and cultural sensitivity than students not in an underserved setting. CONCLUSIONS: Our data suggest that we can produce more racially/ethnically and culturally sensitivity providers through coursework, supervised clinical practice, and experiences in underserved settings. These data are preliminary, and we plan to follow up these results and replicate this work with other cohorts in future semesters.

A Systematic Review of Global Health Assessment for Education in Healthcare Professions

“…Of these, 398 full texts from the original search and 147 full texts from the updated search (final total of 545) were reviewed for inclusion. A final set of 51 full-text articles in the primary search [ 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 ], as well as 28 full-text articles in the updated search [ 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 ] were selected for qual...…”

“…The studies include a broad array of literature with significant diversity ( Table 2 ). The majority of the included articles assessed nursing education (38; 48.1%) [ 21 25 26 28 29 33 35 37 39 42 44 47 51 52 53 54 57 58 63 66 68 69 70 71 72 73 75 77 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 91 98 ], followed by pharmacy (26; 32.9%) [ 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 31 36 38 42 43 51 59 60 61 62 ] and medicine (25; 31.6%) [ 25 26 30 32 34 40 41 42 46 48 49 50 55 56 65 67 76 77 78 79 88 ...…”

“…A total of 12 studies described assessment of more than one health profession [ 21 25 26 28 31 34 42 51 54 68 77 98 ]. Cultural competency (56; 70.9%) [ 21 22 23 24 25 28 30 32 34 36 37 38 39 42 43 44 45 46 47 50 51 52 54 55 56 57 58 61 62 65 66 68 71 72 73 75 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 87 88 89 90 91 93 94 95 96 97 98 ] was the most common aspect of global health subject area, and most studies reported data resulting from standard live didactic course structures (58; 73.4%) [ 20 22 23 24 25 26 28 29 30 31 32 …”

“…Fewer than half of the studies utilized objective knowledge assessments (34; 43.0%) [ 20 22 25 28 31 32 35 36 37 38 40 42 43 44 46 47 49 50 51 57 61 62 65 66 67 71 74 79 89 92 94 95 96 97 ]. Finally, sample sizes were split relatively equally among small (26; 32.9%) [ 25 27 31 32 33 37 38 40 43 48 49 52 53 56 57 58 60 64 70 72 74 82 83 87 91 95 ], medium (30; 38.0%) [ 20 21 23 28 34 36 44 45 50 59 61 62 66 67 68 71 73 76 77 80 81 …”

“…Survey [26,35,56] • ESI [87] • GAP [86] • IAT [41] • Transphobia Scale [25] Not • IES [33] • MLSS [63] Not validated: [20,60,64,76,90] • Chang et al [90] (journal entries, grounded theory)…”