Community Support

Notes from a Roundtable on Conceptualizing and Measuring Cultural Competence

Recommendations for Next Steps

Several recommendations for future directions were made including:

A commitment from CMHS of knowledge development resources to identify best practices for the implementation and evaluation of cultural competence standards.
A follow-up meeting of those with expertise in cultural competence and evaluation to develop consensus around:
- Defining the construct of cultural competence at the system, organization, and individual clinician levels.
- Adopting the WICHE/CMHS Core Cultural Competence Standards in Managed Mental Health Care for Four Underserved/Underrepresented Racial/Ethnic Groups.
- Forming workgroups for each of the three levels of cultural competence: systems, organizations, and individual clinicians. (Each workgroup will build upon existing measures to identify key items to include in an evaluation tool for that area. The newly developed evaluation instrument shall be piloted and tested to establish reliability, validity, and utility).
Convene a joint conference of key groups working on cultural competence evaluation issues (i.e., CMHS, HSRI, WICHE, NYOMH).
Tie development of an instrument or instruments to assess cultural competence to the further development and implementation of the Core Cultural Competence Standards in Managed Mental Health Care for Four Underserved/Underrepresented Racial/Ethnic Groups and the Cultural Competence Performance Measures for Managed Behavioral Healthcare Programs.
Explore collaboration opportunities with other CMHS-funded projects, including the adult and child evaluation technical assistance centers that relate to the work being considered.
Compute the cost of cultural competence to managed care to see if it can demonstrated that cultural competence has a positive effect in a cost neutral way.
Explore involvement of licensing boards and others to gain leverage for cultural competence.

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