Achieving Cultural Competence:
An Organizational Assessment

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How culturally competent is your organization?  Below is a series of questions that can help determine your organization’s ability to deliver culturally competent care:

• How does your organization involve senior management, front line staff and members of diverse communities in cultural competence planning and program development?
   
• Has your organization developed a plan to deliver culturally competent care?  Does the plan outline goals, expectations, timelines, tasks and resources?
   
• How does your organization address community needs? Have you analyzed the demographic characteristics of your service population, as well as each cultural and linguistic group?  Do you have the information needed to plan, implement and evaluate services tailored to the needs of diverse groups? Have you compared the health care needs of diverse populations to those of the overall service population?
   
• Does your organization's demographic/community profile use U.S. Census 2000 data to analyze the five major racial and ethnic groups? To be more specific, are Native Americans identified by tribe? Are Asian-Pacific Islanders identified as Hmong, Vietnamese, Asian Indian or Chinese? Are blacks identified as African-American or Somali? Are Latinos identified as Mexican, Puerto Rican or Cuban?
   
• Has your organization assessed specific service needs of each cultural and linguistic group?  Have you involved local experts, if available, from each group in the cultural competence assessment and plan development?
   
• Has your organization identified disparities between a cultural/linguistic group and the general population? Have you analyzed internal service utilization and health status data to determine disparities?
   
• Has your organization developed a geographic and socio-economic profile of its service area? Does the profile include geographical attributes such as transportation routes and travel distances, as well as socio-economic characteristics, such as income, employment, age, home ownership and public assistance?
   
• Has your organization identified its strengths and deficiencies in serving diverse populations? Has it performed an inventory of its policies, practices and procedures?  Does it conduct periodic evaluations to determine its progress in reaching cultural competence?
   
• Has your organization developed a process for integrating the cultural competence plan into operations? Is there a strategy for ensuring the cultural competence of each service?  Has it integrated cultural competence measures into internal audits, performance improvement programs, satisfaction surveys and outcome-based evaluations?
   
• Has your organization developed a plan to recruit new culturally and linguistically diverse staff? Does it provide cultural competence training for current support staff, caregivers and executives?
   
• Does your organization conduct outreach to culturally and linguistically diverse groups?  Does it tailor the outreach to each community?

Cultural Competence
http://www.aafp.org/fpm/20001000/58cult.html

Cultural Competence Standards Home Page
http://www.omhrc.gov/clas/

Cultural Competence Works
http://www.hrsa.gov/financeMC/ftp/cultural-competence.pdf 

Cultural Competency
http://www.aoa.gov/prof/adddiv/cultural/addiv_cult.asp

Culture Clues
http://depts.washington.edu/pfes/cultureclues.html

EthnoMed
http://healthlinks.washington.edu/ethnomed/

Diversity RX
http://www.diversityrx.org

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