Interprofessional Cultural Awareness Training – Dr Mary-Pat O Malley Keighran

This will be a virtual event over two half-days;

Date: 14th September & the 8th October

Time: 10am till 1pm

Cost: €5 administration fee required.

This is an interdisciplinary events, all Health and Social Care Practitioners are welcome, so you can share your learning and knowledge together.

Cultural competence enhances the ability of providers and organisations to effectively deliver health care services that meet the social, cultural, and linguistic needs of service users. Ireland is a culturally and linguistically diverse nation with the 2016 census revealing that 612,018 residents (13% of the population) are multilingual and speak a language other than Irish or English at home (CSO,  2016). Globalisation and the movement of people to Western countries continues (McNeilly, 2019). A number of surveys have demonstrated that health care professionals do not receive sufficient training to work effectively with culturally and linguistically diverse families (e.g. Newbury e al., 2020). When cultural differences in non-verbal communication and beliefs about health and illness are poorly understood by health care professionals, misdiagnosis may result (Kohnert et al., 2020). For example in Western culture, direct eye contact is seen as a signal of interest, respect, and connection. However, in many cultures respect is shown by not establishing direct eye contact but rather by directing eye gaze downwards (Kohnert, et al., 2020). If a HSCP is unaware of this difference then it may lead him/her to conclude that a child has a communication difficulty in the area of non-verbal communication.

Aim: Participants will choose a specific action to implement in their particular context and report back at the second session on what they did and what they learned from that action. For example, researching information a cultural group that they are not familiar with, taking that information into consideration when interacting with service users, and reflecting on how the knowledge impacted on the interaction

Learning Outcomes: On completion of this training attendees will be able to;
Describe three levels of culture: visible, hidden, & core
Define cultural linguistic diversity
Define cultural competence and cultural humility & their importance for HSCPS
Describe the 6 stages in the process of cultural competence for HSCPS
Discuss where HSCPS are currently in the 6 stages
Describe Hofstede’s (2011) 6 dimensions of national cultures as they relate to HSCPS
Describe the 6 levels of cultural adaptation
Discuss the impact of levels of cultural adaptation on the work of HSCPS
Define cultural bumps
Reflect on their experiences of cultural bumps
Understand the 3 components of Skilled Dialogue (Barrera et al. 2012) as they relate to the work of HSCPS
Describe ethnographic interviewing for HSCPS
Create a personal plan for communicating respect for what others think, believe, value

Facilitator: Dr Mary-Pat O Malley Keighran is a lecturer in speech & language therapy at NUI Galway. She teaches about cultural awareness at undergraduate and postgraduate level across a range of modules. She has created a PG module Social, Linguistic, & Cultural Diversity in Health & Education. She has an evidence based website for disseminating research findings pertaining to working with multilingual families. She runs CPD events regularly, most recently Narratives in Intervention and Emotions & Emotional Literacy in SLT. She runs CPD events regularly, most recently Narratives in Intervention and Emotions & Emotional Literacy in SLT. She has co-run training on the assessment of language in multilingual children as part of the Academic Clinical Alliance between the Discipline of SLT at NUI Galway and HSE SLT departments in a range of HSE areas