The National Healthcare Disparities Report summarizes health care quality and access among various racial, ethnic, and income groups and other priority populations, such as residents of rural areas and people with disabilities.

National Healthcare Disparities Report

In planning psychiatric services for non-English speaking immigrant communities it is essential to know what resources are available for the implementation of service plans. A survey of 991 professionals from a variety of disciplines working in Victorian state operated inpatient and community psychiatric services demonstrates that, although there is a substantial number of bilingual clinicians working in the system, there is a poor match between languages spoken by patient groups and clinicians, infrequent contact between bilingual clinicians and patients speaking the same language, and inadequate availability of interpreting services. Clinicians' knowledge of cultural issues relevant to assessment and treatment is inadequate, and there is some enthusiasm among clinical staff for remedying this deficiency. Clinicians express the opinions that services to non-English speaking patients are inferior, and clinical outcome is worse than for the Australian-born. There appears to be general support for changes w...

Language, culture and psychiatric services: a survey of Victorian clinical staff.

Translation in bilingual psychotherapy.

Efforts have been made to develop a core curriculum for cultural sensitivity training for psychiatry residents. There is a lack of literature reporting effectiveness of various teaching modalities for such training. The authors report their experience with a 4-hour pilot workshop to teach psychiatry residents ethnic and cultural issues in patient care. Pretest and posttest questionnaires were designed to measure residents’ knowledge of cultural issues. There was statistically significant improvement in performance on questionnaires after the workshop (F = 30.6; P<0.001). Further studies are necessary to examine teaching modalities in residency education.

A Cultural Sensitivity Training Workshop for Psychiatry Residents

define what we mean by cultural psychiatry. That this definition is not easily agreed upon is reflected in the many discussions of the term in the pages of this journal, including the use of &dquo;transcultural&dquo; versus &dquo;cultural&dquo; or &dquo;comparative&dquo; in the name Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review (Editor’s Comment, 1986). Within American psychiatry, there has been debate as to whether cultural psychiatry should refer only to so-called ethnic minority groups or ought to have a wider application (Moffic, 1980). Favazza (1986) emphasizes &dquo;the relevance of cultural observations for all individual patients&dquo;. Chang (1986) has questioned whether in the United States, with its emphasis on the individual patient, &dquo;mainstream psychiatry itself is so deeply culture-bound that one may hardly notice it&dquo;. A major problem in defining cultural psychiatry stems of course from the word culture itself, which has a multitude of meanings (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1963; Haldipur, 1980; Barzun, 1984). Williams (1976) believes indeed that the word culture is &dquo;one of the two

Education in Cultural Psychiatry in the United States

Cultural and linguistic barriers have long been problems in establisbing an effective therapeutic alliance between patients and therapists from different cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. The current emphasis on cultural psychiatry has stimulated the inclusion of culturally relevant material in the curricuia of American psychiatric residency programs, such as the program at Howard University Hospital in Washington, D.C. After a preliminary study of foreign patients treated on the psychiatry service, the department of psychiatry established a program of seminars and didactic sessions intended to familiarize staff and trainees with cultural patterns of the largest groups of foreign students attending the university. The department also participated in a transcultural fellowship program for medical students sponsored by the American Psychiatric Association and the National Institute of Mental Health. After describing the programs, the authors briefly discuss such culturally related issues as foreign ...

Debra L. Risher

Papers

Training psychiatric staff to treat a multicultural patient population.