Video Link:
Article:
https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/1472-6963-14-99.pdf
Abstract:
I decided to analyze a research article titled “Interventions to improve cultural competency in healthcare: a systematic review of reviews”. The aim of this systematic review was to “gather and synthesize existing reviews of studies in this field to form a comprehensive understanding of the current evidence base that can guide future interventions and research in the area”. Cultural competency is an approach to improving health care provision to racial/ethnic groups with the aim of reducing racial/ethnic disparities. Since cultural competency was first implemented, a comprehensive evidence base has not been created to assess its effectiveness.They noted that existing research in this field lacked evidence regarding the relationship between cultural competency, improved provider/organizational behaviors, and patient/client health outcomes. In addition, these reviews also lacked a consensus on the most effective ways of improving cultural competency. Essentially, they wanted to research what current evidence is available that can guide future interventions and research in this field. Their methods included search strategy, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and data extraction and analysis. For their search strategy they searched journal collections Medline, Cinahl, Eric, PsycINFO, Proquest, Scopus and the Cochrane Systematic Review Database from 2000 to 2011. After collecting data they evaluated the articles with their inclusion and exclusion criteria. After determining which articles they would include, they then had two authors evaluate the quality using health-evidence.org 10 questions. Finally they extracted and analyzed their data which was then added into Excel. All the data was organized effectively to create a comprehensive understanding of the different data. They found that the majority of reviews showed moderate evidence for improvements in patient/client outcomes. However there was a lack of consistency among studies and self report bias.
For my research proposal, I will be gathering a lot of information about pre-existing curricula and policies in medical education to later assess their effectiveness. This papers methods section did a great job organizing and assessing the documents that they found. I’m hoping to use similar methods in my research proposal.
Truong, M., Paradies, Y., & Priest, N. (2014). Interventions to improve cultural competency in Healthcare: A systematic review of reviews. BMC Health Services Research, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6963-14-99