| Improved Cultural Competence in Health Communications
Project Description
This intervention facilitates the ability of tribal Diabetes Educators and Community Health Representatives to 1) understand their patient’s cultural characteristics relative to diabetes, 2) elicit cultural beliefs and practices about diabetes, 3) acknowledge differences between medical models and personal models, 4) start a mutual search for points of connection across models so that provider-patient communications can be respectfully improved, 5) apply the new skills in the clinic and in the community, and 6) reduce disparities as a result of improved treatment adherence due to better communications of disease models between the health providers and the patients. This intervention elicits perceptions about disease and treatment leading to a negotiation process between the patient and provider. The negotiation process is a joint search for points of connection across professional and personal disease models. These connections are used to facilitate patients’ adoption of new health behaviors without denying their own originating cultural foundations. This initiative is based on prior research using a cultural construction of disease theoretical base that was done in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. It was discovered that alternative cultural models of diabetes were held within and across diabetic patients and health providers resulting in communication and adherence discordance. Emphasis is placed on the potential applicability to, and replicability in, other American Indian and minority populations.
Principal Investigators:
L. Carson Henderson, RN, MPH, PhD
J. Neil Henderson, PhD
Partnering Organizations
Choctaw Nation Health Services Authority (Lead Organization)
Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
Fore More Information
Please Contact:
L. Carson Henderson, PhD, MPH, RN
carson-henderson@ouhsc.edu | 
