Cultural Humility

February 9, 2010 by Stacy Carruth

The RCHC recently had a community advisory board meeting and as part of the agenda, we discussed cultural competency. For the past 5 years or so, we’ve had an on-going effort to address cultural competency in several key areas of our work (CHNA/prevention coalitions, research and policy development, youth development, library, etc.). We wanted to get ideas from the board on how we could evaluate two things 1. our efforts to make our trainings, services and library as culturally relevant as possible 2. our support to communities in working towards cultural competence. One thing that came up immediately was a question about how we define cultural competence. A board member stressed the need to share our definition of cultural competence because if there’s no definition people would just think of race, and ethnicity and we tend to define it much more broadly than this. Knowing how a coalition defines cultural competence is also critical us in evaluating how well we are supporting them in their efforts. If a community hasn’t articulated for us how they define cultural competency - and their goals in working towards cultural competency - we cannot target our support or assess how effective our support is to them. This highlighted for us that the RCHC and our community partners may not be defining terms in the same way, and defining our terms is a good place to start.

Finally, we discussed the term cultural competency itself, and one board member said that she was bothered by the term “competency.” A board member asked, “Is anyone ever really culturally competent?” Cultural competency is a learning process. We’re never there. She preferred the term “cultural humility.”  
The reading selection for our next RCHC journal club is titled “Cultural Humility Versus Cultural Competence: A Critical Distinction in Defining Physician Training Outcomes in Multicultural Education” by Melanie Tervalon, MD, MPH and Jann Murray-García, MD, MPH. If you’re interested in cultural competency, you might want to check this out.

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