Cultural differences between patient and provider contribute to adverse health outcomes through poor communication, value conflicts, and disparate concepts of health and illness. Low health literacy contributes to disparities through misunderstanding and poor adherence. Recent studies and reports focus on interventions to address the communication gap between patients and providers, to redefine the responsibility for closing the gap. Health professions curricula can address both cross-cultural care and close the literacy gap by sharing a common goal of disparity reduction. Instructional topics that cross over include communication skills, bias and stereotyping, community strategies, and the culture of medicine. For example, teaching in health literacy may vary patient presentation to include factors such as limited English proficiency, race/ethnicity, sexual identity or orientation, religious affiliation, health beliefs, age, or gender to address cross-cultural issues. Similarly, existing cultural competency curricula may incorporate limited health literacy as a component of patient or community assessment. Communication tools from each field may be deployed in common. Such tools include the explanatory model of illness, the “teach-back” method, brown bag medication review, and using plain language, among others. Health professions students should be able to access a communication toolbox to select the best tool that minimizes the risk of poor health outcomes due to cross-cultural or health literacy issues. A health literate and culturally competent organization considers its clients stakeholders, identifies high risk clients, aims for equity, designs accessible materials, prepares its workforce for diversity, demonstrates leadership in achieving equity, and actively plans, evaluates, and improves its client/patient outcomes.
Conflict of Interest
The author reports no conflict of interest.