colleagues, I had the privilege of attending and speaking at the seventh
diversity conference in Baltimore. I spoke about European perspectives.
I thought that list participants might find it helpful to see a
distillate of the learning points from my European perspective, which I
shared with our ethnicity research group here in Edinburgh. If anyone
else has made such a distillate, I would be very glad to read it.

11 learning points from the Diversity Conference Baltimore 2010


1.	Cultural competence, with emphasis on communication is big business
and health care businesses whether small or large are taking it very
seriously.

2.	The activity has been driven by CLAS (National Standards for
Culturally and Linguistically appropriate services), a set of standards
led by Office of Minority Health (DHSS), now 10 years old and undergoing
revision.  There is special emphasis on communication, translation,
interpretation etc.  (Updated standards on the way.)

3.	Major academic drive, both research and training.

4.	Cultural competency measurement tools available e.g. 85 question web
based questionnaire designed by Thomas La Veist (COA 360) for hospitals.

5.	Professional organisations are involving themselves e.g. Institute of
Medicine, AMA, American College of Cardiology etc.   Cultural competence
is becoming a component of accreditation schemes.

6.	Emphasis on leadership and leaders, definitely driven from top down,
but still massive fragmentation because of pluralistic systems of health
care.

7.	A lot of work on describing ‘typical’ cultures, and on skilling up staff.

8.	Books and literature expanding very fast e.g. Curriculum for
culturally responsive health care (Ring et al), and minority populations
and health (La Veist).

9.	Some amazing uses of diversity profiling data e.g. N California
branch of Kaiser Permanente gives patient satisfaction by sex, age, and
racial/ethnic group to individual doctors and this is used to set goals,
adjust bonuses and make partnership decisions.  The adjacent branch of
K.P. does not collect such data! (David Newhouse).

10.	Diversity Rx.org website and CLAS list (email) are both well worth
learning about/joining.

11.	Issues becoming global with WHA resolution 2008 and WHO Global
Consultation in 2010.

-- 
Raj

R S Bhopal, Bruce and John Usher Professor of Public Health
Public Health Sciences Section,
Centre for Population Health Sciences,
University of Edinburgh, Teviot Place, Edinburgh EH89AG
Telephone (0)1316503216 (switchboard extension 1000),
Fax (0)1316506909

Departmental website:
   http://www.chs.med.ed.ac.uk

South Asian Health Foundation
http://www.sahf.org.uk

World Congress of Epidemiology 2011
http://www.epidemiology2011.com/

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.