After a lot of narrowing and revising, I’m interested in researching the impact and benefits of cultural competency training in healthcare. This research is essential for evaluating the benefits and weaknesses of this training. In doing so, we can work to improve healthcare experiences for minority communities. It was suggested that I shift my main research questions from generic questions regarding policies and curricula to a more direct questions about the benefits of said policies and curricula. With this adjustment I would use qualitative document analysis to investigate the question:
– “What are the benefits of implementing cultural competency courses in health care training?”
As a byproduct of my initial research I will answer additional questions like:
-“What policies are in place regarding cultural competency training?”
-“What do these courses consist of?”
-“Do medical professionals complete cultural competency training more than once?”.
However, I do foresee a challenge with this new broad question. We discussed narrowing my unit of analysis to a specific medical educator (VCU). I was planning on investigating their specific curricula and policies. With this shift, I feel as though my unit of analysis will also become broader and I will become overwhelmed once again.
I propose that I investigate benefits and effectiveness of VCUs cultural competency training. First, I will use qualitative document analysis to sift through their existing curricula and policies. Then I will conduct practitioner and patient qualitative surveys evaluating the benefits and effectiveness of these courses. I would also like to repeat these same steps with UVAs curricula and policies to cross examine different Virginia programs. I plan to analyze and organize my data in a similar manner as the paper I discussed in my research presentation. They created an excel sheet to compile existing reviews of cultural competency to form a comprehensive understanding of the current evidence base. I have attached the paper below. Since we are changing course a bit, I’d like to hear your thoughts.
https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/track/pdf/10.1186/1472-6963-14-99.pdf
Since I last spoke to you after class I want to change a few things about my methods. Like we discussed, I’m going to work backwards starting with qualitative document analysis of current curricula for cultural competency training in healthcare. Through this I will answer questions like:
-What policies are in place regarding cultural competency training?”
-“What do these courses consist of?”
-“Do medical professionals complete cultural competency training more than once?”
-”what are the goals of this training?”
Then I will then investigate the lived experiences of minority communities within our healthcare system. After completing this ethnographic research, I will cross compare it with the circula in place. I’m looking for gaps between the lived experiences of minority communities and the intended benefits of cultural competency courses. This will ultimately allow me to assess whether there are benefits to implementing these courses. Future research might involve ways to rework or reinforce current curricula depending on the results.
You have two sets of methods in play. First, you’re conducting textual analysis, and you’ll need to have a methodological approach to how you’ll organize that content. The table in the paper you shared in your initial post is a useful way to organize your results, but be sure to consider the step-by-step method you’d follow to come up with results like those. Second, you’re conducting ethnographic observations combined with structured or semi-structured interviews to get a sense of the lived experience of minority participants who’ve received medical care. Here, you’ll need to methods to both collect that data (observation, survey, recorded interview, etc.) and methods to analyze the data in a form that can be connected in some way to the results of your initial review of current curricula. Added to those methods will be a means of connecting the results from each set of methods. What step-by-step methods will you use to correlate intentions in curricula with lived experiences among minority healthcare recipients? What key aspects of their experience will you use to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of training? This remains a pretty significant project with many moving parts. May I suggest that, for this project, you focus on proposing a study of lived experiences of minority recipients of care, then use the review of reviews research findings as a proxy for your analysis of cultural competency curricula. This proposal would localize your collecting of lived experiences, then relate that lived experience to a more global set of curricular approaches to cultural competency. That’s a good starting point, from which you could then propose a second study (not required for this assignment) of local cultural competency curricula. And to be honest, you could probably reverse those, meaning you could propose the review for this assignment and leave the lived experience study for another project.