Oral

The Cultural Competence and Health Literacy session focuses on various strategies to improve health decisions, with an emphasis on cultural and linguistic competency and health literacy. Cultural and linguistic competency and health literacy are important considerations in any approach that intends to address health disparities. Better health outcomes are inversely associated with low health literacy and its relation to inadequate health knowledge and increased likelihood of unhealthy behaviors. Health literacy assessment and its impact on patient outcomes are addressed at the patient level in a process used with adolescent mothers that informed the development and implementation of educational materials to increase breastfeeding. Cultural and linguistic competency is explored at the provider level in implementation of a collaborative model used in the training of clinicians to improve culturally competent communication and reduce health literacy barriers. A cultural competency resource center provides information on accredited online curricula, web materials, and information on health policy. These tools are available for physicians and nurses to guide patient care and preparation for disasters and crisis response. This session also includes a discussion of tools for individual decision-making for chronic diseases, including a provider team approach, that are designed to increase the quality of treatment decisions. DVD based decision aids (DAs) address various screening tests—diabetes, prostate cancer, and colorectal cancer—as well as depression and back pain. Each DA incorporates methods to address language barriers and limited literacy skills. The structured Shared Decision Making (SDM) approach involves a health educator partnering with a clinician for one-on-one encounters with patients and introducing the DVDs.

Session Objectives: • Explain the importance of health literacy, how it can be measured, and its association with health outcomes • Describe components of and concepts related to cultural and linguistic competency in healthcare and healthcare education, including available resources that provide culturally and linguistically appropriate services. • Discuss decision-making in primary care—both the use of decision aids for individual consideration and implementing Shared Decision Making (SDM) between patients, providers and health educators—particularly as it relates to cultural diversity.