Cultural Competency in Healthcare

In most Western countries, accreditation bodies for medical and health care professional training programs mandate that graduates should be able to deliver culturally sensitive and appropriate care to patients from diverse sociocultural backgrounds. However, the definition of cultural competence (CC) and effective pedagogies are inconsistent, leading to confusion among educators and students.

Through collaborative research, the interdisciplinary team at King’s, composed of medical educators, clinicians, social scientist, scholars in arts and humanities, and research students work to understand the manifestation of inequality and injustice in health and care, and the best practice to increase equity in medicine and healthcare. We are particularly interested in how empirical knowledge can be reconstructed to inform practice and policy, which forms part of the conceptualisation of cultural competence as a subject as well as a professional practice.