Encouraging our patients to join our learning culture: Moving on from cultural competence to cultural humility

There is an expectation of culturally responsive and culturally safe health services which is reflected in professional competency and accreditation standards. Thus, cultural competency training has become an important part of health professional education. Whilst it may be comforting to consider one has achieved cultural “competence”, cultures are dynamic, every individual within a cultural group is not the same and a recipe book approach to cultural interactions may be neither helpful nor appropriate. We argue that, too often, cultural competence training is developed with a focus on mastery of understanding ‘others’ and ‘their needs’ as a group. More recently, there have been proposals for a move from cultural competence to cultural humility, a move away from mastery towards individual accountability and acknowledgement of power imbalances. A healthcare professional seeking to embody cultural humility commits to active engagement in life-long self-reflection and self-critique and, in doing so, encourages the patient to also be the teacher, and they become a learner in a partnership. We propose that critical self-reflection is instrumental in this re-imagining of patient and health providers roles. In this reimagined model the first step is exploring our own cultural identities and considering how our back ground helps or hinders our connection to patients. Thereafter, developing an openness to input from our patients and what we learn about ourselves and our practice by engaging with patients who are different to us. Our presentation will outline further steps towards cultural humility and associated concepts such as empathy and self-efficacy