Healthcare inequalities may partly be due healthcare professionals’
ignorance of ethnic minority healthcare needs, according to an article in the latest edition of Clinical Medicine, published by the Royal College of Physicians. Cultural diversity programmes have been shown to improve patient outcomes, yet the research for this article found that the training of all major UK healthcare professionals in cultural diversity is inadequate.
Authors Paul Bentley, Ana Jovanovic and Pankaj Sharma revealed a wide variation in teaching practices between healthcare professions and geographic regions. Effective cultural competency training would help to make sure medical education meets the goal of improving healthcare for the whole population and tackle healthcare inequality. The authors call on UK regulatory healthcare bodies to consider cultural competency to be a requirement for all healthcare professional trainees.
An article published in the medical education-themed September 10 issue of JAMA finds that white medical students are more likely to consider themselves highly prepared to provide care for minority populations if they attended schools with racial and ethnically diverse student bodies.
Under the belief that diversity exposes students to a broader field of ideas, experiences, and perspectives, most medical schools in the United States explicitly try to keep their student bodies racially and ethnically varied. The schools also believe that diversity in the classroom better prepares student to provide services to the multicultural American population. However, little research exists to support the claim of educational benefits from diversity in medical schools.
Switzerland will hold a referendum on whether to ban building any more minarets in the Alpine country, the government said on Tuesday.
A group of politicians from the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) and Federal Democratic Union gathered more than 100,000 signatures to support the initiative, saying the minarets threaten law and order.
Switzerland has two minarets, in Zurich and Geneva, which would be unaffected by the vote. Neither issues a Moslem call to prayer.
“The Federal Chancellery checks of the signature list showed that of the total 114,137 signatures turned in, 113,540 are valid,” the government said in a statement.
The proposal has to be discussed by parliament before being put to a popular vote and the process could take several years.
The SVP previously ran an anti-immigration campaign featuring three white sheep kicking a black sheep off a Swiss flag. The campaign was condemned as racist by rights groups and the United Nations.
The launch of the website for Our Languages, a groundbreaking initiative funded by the DCSF, takes place today at the third CILT Community Languages National Conference in Sheffield.
The new website, hosted by CILT, the National Centre for Languages, provides vital information and support for community languages teachers and managers in the UK. Content includes video clips showing best practice, case studies, useful links and training and event information. Key features include a database of schools teaching community languages in England and information on how to gain accreditation in community languages: www.ourlanguages.org.uk
The Our Languages project began in September 2007 in response to a need to raise the status of community languages in the curriculum and to recognise the work of the complementary (or supplementary) sector in England. The project aims to provide support for community languages teaching by developing partnerships between complementary and mainstream schools. In its first phase, which ran until March 2008, nine schools, teaching more than twelve community languages, formed regional partnerships in Birmingham, Leicester, London and Manchester.
Cross-cultural competence (3C), another term for inter-cultural competence, has generated its own share of contradictory and confusing definitions, due to the wide variety of academic approaches and professional fields attempting to achieve it for their own ends. One author identified no fewer than eleven different terms with some equivalence to 3C: cultural savvy, astuteness, appreciation, literacy or fluency, adaptability, terrain, expertise, competency, awareness, intelligence, and understanding (Selmeski, 2007).
Organizations from fields as diverse as business, health care, government security and developmental aid agencies, academia, and non-governmental organizations have all sought to leverage 3C in one guise or another, often with poor results due to a lack of rigorous study of the phenomenon and reliance on “common sense” approaches based on the culture developing the 3C models in the first place (Selmeski, 2007).
The U.S. Army Research Institute, which is currently engaged in a study of the phenomenon, defines 3C as: “A set of cognitive, behavioral, and affective/motivational components that enable individuals to adapt effectively in intercultural environments” (Abbe et al., 2007). Cross-cultural competence does not operate in a vacuum, however. One theoretical construct posits that 3C, language proficiency, and regional knowledge are distinct skills that are inextricably linked, but to varying degrees depending on the context in which they are employed. In educational settings, Bloom’s affective and cognitive taxonomies (Bloom, 1956; Krathwohl, Bloom, & Masia, 1973) serve as an effective framework to describe the overlap area between the three disciplines: at the receiving and knowledge levels 3C can operate with near independence from language proficiency or regional knowledge, but as one approaches the internalizing and evaluation levels the required overlap area approaches totality.
The Interculturale Theatre Storytelling Laboratory
Presents
the gift of diversity
Intercultural Theatre Storytelling Festival
II Edition - Rome, May 8-24 2008 The idea
Interculture means confront, exchange and communication among diverse cultures, towards an opened view and a larger dialogue between differences, against each discrimination. However, somehow, privileging interest to origins and traditions of the person that we meet - even if he is rich and amazing - and that normally we call a stranger, we may risk to forget his true particularity, maybe the most important thing: his story and not his country’s one, his experience and not his people’s one, his emotions and feelings, not his race’s one. So, we can make the mistake to build a weak and false image, a masquerade, where people are just playing roles: the African, the Chinese, the Arabian and so on. Words are important and, when concepts linked to them have a fundamental value in our life, contradictions are not possible. We are different or equal? We can’t be both, this is our provocation. If you think we are all unique, then, maybe, you could agree with the idea behind this project: the most powerful, significant and revolutionary way to have an intercultural point of view, in other words, to underline the importance of differences and richness inside our individuality, is to show the diversity of people that often think themselves as equal (not celebrating the equality of strangers…), to tell how much they are interesting to listen when they are speaking of themselves and how all become wonderful if they are so proud to mix each others.
II Edition
In May 2008 we’ll present the second edition of this festival. The last year, the first one was thought to put the bases and this time we whish to show our idea of interculture. Local or foreign artists, considering their diversity as a gift, will tell their story with their personal language or dialect. Because Italy and all countries in the world are wonderfully multicultural places even without immigrants, which are just other colours to improve the rainbow…
Almost seventy artists and companies, since North to South, sent us their proposals, convincing us that our point of view is not so crazy. After a hard selection will present nine shows from all Italy. The aim is to create a space where, thanks to Theatre Storytelling, interculture will become just culture, while actors and public will agree that diversity is the first value to celebrate.
The participants are, in order of appearance:
May 8, 9.00 p.m.: “Scantu[1]”, by and with Adele Tirante, “Cosa sono le nuvole” and “Viaggio inverso”
May 9, 9.00 p.m.: “Francesco Pileggi, the true story of a man of honour[2]”,
by and with Andrea Chianelli
May 10, 9.00 p.m.: “Calafrica[3]”, by and with Manuela Valenti
May 15, 9.00 p.m.: “Refugees”, by and with “Rataplab”
May 16, 9.00 p.m.: “Zagara”, by and with Maria Cristina Sarò
May 17, 9.00 p.m.: “It’s spring”, by and with Antonio Carletti
May 22, 9.00 p.m.: “Horrible heritage on the lake[4]”,
by and with “The differents, almost equal but different”
May 23, 9.00 p.m.: “The town of Punt”, by and with Elisa Menchicchi
May 24, 9.00 p.m. : “The true story of Jean Baptiste du Val-de-Grâce, orator of the human race”,
by and with Alessandro Ghebreigziabiher and Cecilia Moreschi
The festival will be at the Studio Uno Theatre (www.studiounoteatro.it), in Rome,
Via Carlo della Rocca, 6.
The Laboratory:
The Intercultural theatre storytelling laboratory is directed by Alessandro Ghebreigziabiher (www.alessandroghebreigziabiher.it), with the precious collaboration of Cecilia Moreschi.
The employment gap between white and black and ethnic minority (BME) workers is closing steadily, according to a report by the TUC.
The TUC report said the employment gap had narrowed by 2.2% over the past 10 years and now stands at 15.7%.
This comes despite recent criticism of government efforts to close the gap, with accusations that some specialist schemes were wound-up too soon.
The fastest area of growth in BME employment has been part-time work, with the number doing this more than doubling in 10 years. However, just 60.1% of BME people are in work, compared to 75.8% in the wider population.
Medical staff require professional interpreters and specific training on intercultural awareness, a new study published in the open access journal BMC Health Services Research suggests. The authors reveal that doctors are dissatisfied with the treatment they provide to their non-native patients, and that they cite cultural differences and language barriers as the key factors causing the disappointment with the level of care that they provide.
Birgit Babitsch from the Berlin Institute of Gender in Medicine in Germany, and co-workers from Berlin and the UK, gathered the results of questionnaires completed by doctors working in the internal medicine and gynaecology departments of three Berlin hospitals. The responses were then narrowed down to those relating to native Germans and those of Turkish origin and analysed in conjunction with the patients’ medical records. Over 2400 doctor questionnaires and corresponding patient records were finally analyzed.
The researchers found that doctors’ dissatisfaction with the patient-doctor relationship was much greater with regard to their Turkish patients. The two main reasons given were communication difficulties and the doctors’ perceptions that the Turkish patients did not always require urgent treatment. Around 20% of doctors were dissatisfied with the course of treatment for Turkish patients, compared to 10% for German patients. Minor differences were found in doctors’ satisfaction with regard to the patient’s gender.
Dr Babitsch states: “The use of professional interpreters for improved communication and the training of medical staff for improved intercultural competence are essential for the provision of adequate health care in a multicultural setting.”
An official UK event for the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue 2008
In the cities of today and tomorrow, how can people from different cultures really live together - rather than just rub along side one another?
As part of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, the Intercultural Cities Conference, will look at migration, diversity and urban life in a fresh way. New thinking is needed on how diverse communities can co-operate in productive harmony instead of leading parallel or antagonistic lives.
The conference is organised by EUCLID and Comedia, in association with the Liverpool Culture Company, and with the support of the European Commission and the Council of Europe.
Taking place in this year’s European Capital of Culture the conference will not only provide an opportunity to look at how different cultures can live together but how mixing can be turned to economic, social and cultural advantage - key issues particularly for those responsible for planning and regeneration, the local economy, community cohesion, education and the cultural services.
The three day event will feature various European and international speakers, such as globalisation guru Saskia Sassen, the world authority on diversity and city planning Leonie Sandercock, Lord Bhikhu Parekh, who says it is time to rethink multiculturalism, city leadership expert Carol Coletta, Keith Khan who leads the campaign to make the London 2012 Olympics an unprecedented intercultural festival, and leading European city politicians including Ilda Curti and Pascale Bonniel Chalier.
The conference format will break with convention in pursuit of maximum interaction between delegates and speakers. There will also be the opportunity to get out into Liverpool to see some examples of intercultural dialogue and delegates can also choose from various extra activities, such as a dinner at Anfield, the home of Liverpool Football Club, featuring comedian Shazia Mirza.
Full details can be found at http://inter.culture.info/icc including the early bird booking fee, only available until 31 March
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