Enhancing Culturally Sensitive Practices

A key component to the ISCOPES program is the collaboration with and involvement of the community through all aspects of ISCOPES’ projects. In order to be an effective partner with our community, we must first understand goals as individuals and as health care professionals. We must also recognize the important roles we play and our responsibilities to our community as members of the health care system. In order to provide the most effective health information and care possible, we must cultivate our connections in and relationships with the community.

As with any partnership over time, there are sometimes disagreements that can create tension. This dynamic is no different for a university and its community. With regard to ISCOPES, such tensions can result when team projects are implemented in the community without seeking community input on the relevance, feasibility or best method, and therefore fail to meet the community’s most pressing concerns. In some such cases, these projects can engender more harm than good, which is counterproductive and diametrically opposed to ISCOPES’ aim. 

Each member of the community is a complex person full of thoughts, feelings, skills, experiences, and abilities. Each of us has a lens through which we view the world and, while we view others with our individual lens, others do the same to us using their lenses.  However, what we perceive about others and what is perceived about us may or may not be accurate or in concert. Thus, it takes time, presence, dialogue, and true collaboration in the community to challenge perceptions and to build a shared understanding.  Then, working together, we can build organizations and systems to better support all in the community.

Hence, a key component of ISCOPES is enhancing culturally sensitive practices. It is important to minimize cultural miscommunications before they arise and to harness the positive energy that can come from diversity. To this end, everyone who participates in ISOCPES needs to be equipped with the knowledge, attitudes, skills, and abilities that foster positive and effective relationships relevant to the projects to be established and maintained in a particular context and time. To do so, it is necessary to develop cultural competence, to learn how to identify community assets, and to become socially just health care providers and leaders. In ISCOPES, we achieve this through three components of the Enhancing Culturally Sensitive Practices curriculum:

            Cultural Competence
            Social Justice
            Community Asset Mapping