From Sensitivity to Competence Posted on July 7, 2008 Joaquin Borrego, Jr (bio) describes the history of research in cultural competence.

There's been a movement in psychology about cultural sensitivity, cultural competence, and now it's cultural validity, ecological validity. And it started off of the information that we were getting from the 60's and the 70's about a study that came out by Stanley Sue in 1977 and the President's Commission mental health report that came out in 1978 that basically said, "We are not doing a good job; mental health needs of ethnic minority populations." So that has served as a catalyst.

And the first movement was being culturally sensitive, being aware, being knowledgeable and having adequate skills. Now we're moving towards is the issue about cultural competence. So we've; I think from my view, we've moved from cultural sensitivity to being culturally competent. But there's not a lot of good data out there to suggest what we're doing is actually having an impact where they — the clients are improving. I think conceptually it makes since, why we should train people to be competent in general. But again, even as 2001 when the US Surgeon report published a supplemental to their 1990 report about race, culture and ethnicity, it's basically the same. We're not doing a good job of addressing the needs of ethnic minority populations. They're still an underserved population regarding mental health and we haven't; even that as a science, we haven't been able to figure out. I think in spirit, we all agree with the concept that we should be culturally competent and provide culturally appropriate services, but it's not; the science is not there at a widely disseminated model.

Now what we're doing with this conference is we're bringing together scholars in different stages of their training from full professors to assistant professors as you saw, from medical school settings to university settings who are sharing some of this information. Now we need to publicize this or disseminate this information at a more widespread level.

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