Cross-cultural Medical Education

TLDR

Cross‑cultural curricula are integrated into undergraduate medical education to address the critical need for understanding patients’ sociocultural health values, yet challenges remain, notably the lack of robust evaluation strategies. The article aims to prepare students to care for diverse patients and address racial, cultural, and gender biases, while offering conceptual approaches and an evaluation framework for assessing attitudes, knowledge, skills, and health‑outcome impacts. The authors present conceptual approaches and an evaluation framework that assess students’ attitudes, knowledge, skills, and the impact of curricular interventions on health outcomes.

Abstract

Given that understanding the sociocultural dimensions underlying a patient's health values, beliefs, and behaviors is critical to a successful clinical encounter, cross-cultural curricula have been incorporated into undergraduate medical education. The goal of these curricula is to prepare students to care for patients from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, and to recognize and appropriately address racial, cultural, and gender biases in health care delivery. Despite progress in the field of cross-cultural medical education, several challenges exist. Foremost among these is the need to develop strategies to evaluate the impact of these curricular interventions. This article provides conceptual approaches for cross-cultural medical education, and describes a framework for student evaluation that focuses on strategies to assess attitudes, knowledge, and skills, and the impact of curricular interventions on health outcomes.