Cultural Competence, Safety, Humility, and Dexterity in Surgery

Abstract

Purpose of Review As the United States’ population diversifies, urgent action is required to identify, dismantle, and eradicate persistent health disparities. The surgical community must recognize how patients’ values, beliefs, and behaviors are influenced by race, ethnicity, nationality, language, gender, socioeconomic status, physical and mental ability, sexual orientation, and occupation. Recent Findings Lately, health disparities have been highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Surgery is no exception, with notable disparities occurring in pediatric, vascular, trauma, and cardiac surgery. In response, numerous curricula and training programs are being designed to increase cultural competence and safety among surgeons. Summary Cultural competence, safety, humility, and dexterity are required to improve healthcare experiences and outcomes for minorities. Various opportunities exist to enhance cultural competency and can be implemented at the medical student, resident, attending, management, and leadership levels.

Cultural humility and cultural competence in counseling: An exploratory mixed methods investigation

“…Relatedly, counselor educators and supervisors may benefit from incorporating cultural frameworks that have been developed in allied fields (c.f., Bangs et al., 2022). Holding promise is the expansion of cultural andragogy that includes aspects of both cultural safety and cultural dexterity (Smith et al., 2022). Counselor educators focusing on cultural safety could support students in examining and deconstructing power dynamics and positional hierarchies within the counseling profession so that they can reduce biases and improve equity within their provision of counseling services.…”

Factors affecting the adoption of metaverse in healthcare: The moderating role of digital division, and meta-culture

“…Social factors like living conditions, working conditions, jobs, and access to quality healthcare are not the same for all, and these inequalities are challenges for any healthcare system [ 128 , 129 ]. These issues can be resolved through cultural competence, and healthcare organizations continuously try to promote cultural competence for those from culturally diverse backgrounds [ 130 ]. In other words, cultural competence is a powerful tool to address the healthcare disparities among people of diverse backgrounds [ 131 ].…”

Cultural Competence and the Postoperative Experience: Pain Control and Rehabilitation

“…Smith et al. 10 explain that cultural competence training must occur at multiple levels, including the individual, surgical teams, academic centers, and physician training programs. They emphasize that cultural competency training must begin early in medical education with the recruitment of diverse minorities and should routinely be required of all healthcare providers regardless of background or level of training.…”

“…They emphasize that cultural competency training must begin early in medical education with the recruitment of diverse minorities and should routinely be required of all healthcare providers regardless of background or level of training. 10 This emphasis on the recruitment of diverse healthcare providers was a suggestion of physiotherapists in the rehabilitation literature. 42 , 47 Studies investigating this topic have concluded that diversity in healthcare providers helps to eliminate disparities by improving patient satisfaction and trust, increasing cultural competence in the patient-provider relationship, expanding minority patient’s use of healthcare, increasing access to care for geographically underserved populations, and promoting the inclusion of minorities in research, as well as other societal benefits.…”

“… 7 Although research is limited, it is thought that culturally competent healthcare organizations and providers will be able to provide quality care and improve patient outcomes, experience, and safety. 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 Upadhyay et al. 11 demonstrated that hospital systems with high degrees of diversity program engagement had 4.64% higher perceptions of management support for safety compared to hospitals with low engagement in diversity programs ( P < .05).…”