Applications of The Cultural Awareness, Skill, & Knowledge (C-ASK) Interview Tool: Cultivating Cultural Competence

Culturally competent practice requires an examination of one's own attitude and values, and the acquisition of the values, knowledge, skills, and attributes that allow an individual to work appropriately in cross cultural situations (MCHB, 1999). The Cultural Awareness, Skill, & Knowledge (C-ASK) Interview Tool was developed in a diverse urban community mental health setting to help practitioners gain awareness of the cultural background and social issues of their patients (Yamada & Brekke, 2008). While administering the tool is straightforward, training providers to use the information generated from this interview tool is a challenge that has received little attention. Determining how to best train providers to cultivate the cultural data in a way to promote competent practice is imperative and was the focus of our current phase of research. In-depth follow-up qualitative interviews were conducted with ten mental health care providers trained to administer the C-ASK. Providers were asked to identify key sociocultural issues identified through the C-ASK administration. Results indicated that providers struggled to identify such content. Challenges impeding their use of this tool included limited time for assessment, lack of integration of the tool into routine practice, and common cognitive errors such as selective or inaccurate observation of the obtained information. To address these barriers we developed an additional 90 minute training session to demonstrate effective ways to: (1) link cultural assessment with meaningful outcomes, (2) adapt the tool to agency/client needs, and (3) share findings with patients to prioritize treatment goals and shared decision making. Through additional training and resources (eg, a patient interview video, sample billing, ease notes) it is hoped that providers will be able to cultivate sufficient skills to do more than elicit sociocultural issues; providers must extract the relevant data and apply it to meaningful patient goals and treatment plans. Pilot testing of these applied training materials will be conducted to further determine the most efficacious means of capturing and applying the information gleaned from the C-ASK interview.

Conflict of Interest

The author reports no conflict of interest.