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Cultural Competency Training is a form of instruction used in a variety of professional training programs designed to increase someone’s level of cultural competence. This training is particularly relevant for helping professions, such as healthcare or social work, in addition to more recent attention within educator preparation programs. The goal is to train professionals in order to provide them with necessary skills which will allow them to work successfully with diverse populations of people who come from cultural backgrounds that differ from their own.

Much of the existing literature about the effectiveness of cultural competency training is found within health care professions such as medicine and nursing. This research addresses identifies three main aspects of cultural competency training; evaluation of cultural competency training programs, reviews of the methodological approaches to evaluation of such training programs and identification of frameworks or conceptual understandings of how to develop effective cultural competence training.

Evaluation of Cultural Competency Training Programs

The majority of the existing literature focuses on outcome evaluation for professionals who participate in these training programs as far as their ability to move towards a higher level of cultural competency. These studies used mostly qualitative measurements such as comments within a survey and semi structured interviews in order to gauge participants’ level of satisfaction with the training experience and self reported movements towards increased cultural competency .

Evaluation Methods

Existing reviews of the literature examine the methods behind measuring the effectiveness of training programs. Price, et al. frame their review as needing to understand the approaches to evaluating training program effectiveness in order to begin to understand the impact of such trainings on the reduction of health disparities. Their review found that there is a lack of methodological rigor in such studies which is problematic as it leads to a poor understanding of the effectiveness of such programs. A second review finds that the majority of the existing literature that evaluate program effectiveness uses problematic methodology in that the methods ignore power relations, assume practitioners are white and conceive of competence in terms of the racialized “other” and that greater confidence in ability to practice with competence actually indicates such ability.

Framework for Effective Program Development

When structuring effective cultural competency training programs, existing research draws on concepts such as Critical Race Theory as a framework. Abrams and Moio discuss successful implementation of a cultural competency social work training program framed in Critical Race Theory. The study conducted by Razack and Jeffrey presents a model for social work training that provides an aggressive critique of the larger institutional structures, providing a perspective that is often lacking in current cultural competency training. This approach addresses the additional perspectives that are typically missing in traditional cultural competency training; contending with resistance, reframing outcomes, overcoming equalization of oppression/color blindness and moving to action and anti oppression practice.