It really depends on what population you will be working with. I am not an MD, yet ( official disclaimer) but have worked as an EMT with very disparate communities, as well as with patients in a major hospital, been a patient, etc. so I do have experience.
If you are working in NY, for example, you will have to be familiar with Jewish religious observances ( kosher, Sabbath and holy days, etc. ). Then there are also fairly large West Indian, African and Central American communities. So Spanish is useful. If you were to work in a hospital like Downstate, a rudimentary French would be helpful. If you are working in the southwest or Southern Cali, you will need some good Spanish skills and familiarity with Mexican, Central American folk culture ( i.e. Catholicism, ancestor worship,e etc ). In some cultures you dont inform the patient if they have a terminal illness, but their family. In others, you inform the patient and noone else. Cultural competency is something that you will have to acquire through some basic classroom/book learning to get some background information on the community you work with and then mostly just hands on experience.
I agree with this, and I think the idea of getting some background on the community of interest and then learning the rest via hands on experience is an important point.
And the original request for a single sheet with a statement about each culture reminds me a bit of why I really don't like this kind of stuff taught in med school, despite the fact I think it's important info for a doctor to be aware of, and I'm really very interested myself in different cultures and their interactions with the medical establishment. (I am not knocking you fizzbot, I'm really not, I understand what you're asking for and that you need to cite stuff for a required assignment, so please don't think it's towards you).
But the fact is, to me defining this topic as "Cultural Competency" and sticking it in a curriculum has this effect of boiling down entire cultures to little blurbs that, as med students, we want summed up and put into a nice little table to go into First Aid so we can memorize it for boards:
Black Americans: Some supposed cultural trait, vaguely offensive
Latinos: Some other cultural trait, apparently implied to be true of all Spanish speakers ever
Jehovah's Witnesses: Something else
Asians: Whatever else, true of course of all Asians...etc etc
To me this isn't what cultural competency should be, but if it's part of a required curriculum in med school, it's what it inevitably will be due to the nature of med students and the considerable, and honestly much more pressing, time demands on us. It shouldn't just be a checkbox, like you've completed Cultural Competency training in the same sense as you've completed, say, your medical center's fire safety training or something, or completed your immunization requirements...It's not something you get by sitting in a lecture hall for am hour per semester. Language and culture color everything about the human experience. People can study and be completely immersed in a culture that's different from their own, and not even begin to fully understand it for years. And that's just one! No one, not even the most open-minded anthropologist, fully understands all cultures they might encounter in medicine -- that's not the point of cult. competency, to have a list of characteristics about each culture to memorize so you're prepared when they come in your office. So to me, this idea of attending one lecture on cultural competency and reading a sheet with a list of supposed characteristics, and then saying "Now I am culturally competent!" drives me absolutely crazy.
To say nothing of the fact that they're the most preaching-to-the choir classes I personally have ever taken...The people interested in the topic don't become MORE sensitive to other cultures, and the ones who go in not caring spend the whole time rolling their eyes and then leave still not caring...
I apologize for the rant, I know that's not what you were asking for...It just annoys me to no end that this is the kind of thing they have people doing for this kind of class.
