Culture & the Clinical Encounter: An Intercultural Sensitizer for the Health Professions

Rena Gropper has selected a proven tool, the cultural assimilator for addressing critical incidents faced by healthcare professionals in increasingly diverse patient/caregiver relationships. In Section One, the Introduction, she explains her choice of this method and rebaptizes it "intercultural sensitizer." Rightly so, as it's purpose is less to encourage assimilation, than to alert clinicians to the dynamics of difference in healthcare encounters.Section Two contains 43 (my count -- it would have helped to number them) critical incidents that involve largely Asian, Latin, Native American, African American, Rom Gypsy and Muslim patients and professionals. There are representative questions from other cultures as well. Section Three gives the user feedback on his or her choices for each situation. Finally, Section Four revisits cultural behaviors briefly but coherently by topic and ties them into a general perspective. Until too recently cultural information about patient-caregiver interactions was buried in medical monographs and professional journals, at best handed on by cognoscenti to their interns and associates. Diversity programs have been largely aimed at workplace relationships, not diverse patient needs. Journalist Lynn Payer popularized the cultural side of medicine in 1988 in her informative and entertaining, Medicine and Culture. Starting in the early 1990's Suzanne Salimbene's series on What Language Does Your Patient Hurt In? signaled a healthy trend to providing practical cross-cultural training for caregivers. Her more recent Multicultural HealthCare Calendar and HealthCare DIVERSOPHY training game show the field beginning to mature. Rena Gropper's Culture and the Clinical Encounter offers educators and trainers one more solid learning technology.