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Culturally Competent Health Care

Search Strategy

We searched 8 databases for studies evaluating interventions to increase cultural competence in healthcare systems: Medline, ERIC, Sociological Abstracts, SciSearch, Dissertation Abstracts, Social Science Abstracts, Mental Health Abstracts, and HealthSTAR. Internet resources were examined, as were reference lists of reviewed articles and referrals from specialists in the field. To be included in the reviews of effectiveness, studies had to:

  • Document an evaluation of a healthcare system intervention to increase cultural or linguistic competence
  • Be conducted in an Established Market Economy
  • Be published in English between 1965 and 2001
  • Compare outcomes among groups of people exposed to the intervention with outcomes among groups of people not exposed or less exposed to the intervention (whether the comparison was concurrent between groups or before-and-after within groups)
  • Measure outcomes defined by the analytic framework for the intervention