The Third National Conference on
Quality Health Care for Culturally Diverse Populations:
Advancing Effective Health Care through Systems Development, Data, and Measurement

October 2 - 4, 2002, Chicago, IL
Westin Chicago River North Hotel

Session A-5: Strategies for collecting demographic information on diverse populations

Assessment of Curriculum on Cultural Competence Education in Medical Schools

This session will discuss criteria for the assessment of curriculum on cultural competence in medical schools, describe an evaluation instrument to facilitate curriculum assessment and apply this evaluation instrument in a practical exercise. The session is framed in the larger context of eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care.

With the increasing diversity of the population of the United States and strong evidence of racial and ethnic disparities in health care it is critically important that health care professionals are educated to specifically address issues of culture in an effective manner. In 2000 the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) introduced a standard requiring that all medical schools assure cultural competence education.

To assist medical schools with the development, implementation and assessment of cultural competence education programs, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), supported by a grant from the Commonwealth Fund, has convened experts to develop a Tool for the Assessment of Cultural Competence Training (TACCT).

Experts in cultural competence and medical education identified key domains of cultural competence education and for each of these components considered the specific knowledge, skills and attitudes these represented. The panels are refining an instrument to catalogue where and how these can be taught throughout the four years of medical schools as well as what evaluation methods can be used to assess the effectiveness of the educational process.

Deborah Danoff, MD
Associate Vice President
Division of Medical Education
Association of American Medical Colleges
2450 North Street
Washington, DC 20037
Phone: 202-628-0982
E-mail: ddanoff@aamc.org

Dr. Danoff is Associate Vice President in the Division of Medical Education at the Association of American Medical Colleges. She is presently coordinating programs related to the practice of medicine including teaching and learning about cultural competence, professionalism and end of life care. She is principal investigator on The Commonwealth Fund supported project Medical Education and Cultural Competence: A Strategy to Eliminate Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. She has also served on the advisory committees for a number of cultural competence education projects including those for the California Endowment and the Office of Minority Health. In January 2001, she assumed responsibility for coordinating activities for the AAMC-CDC cooperative agreement (CA). This agreement enhances the involvement of the academic medicine community in programmatic issues of interest to the CDC by allowing the AAMC and its member institutions to participate more fully in the CDC’s extramural research activities. Currently, the AAMC is directly involved in projects that include work to develop regional public health-medical education consortia to enhance the medical student and resident education on public health and preventive medicine as well as the development of curricular materials on bioterrorism and on injury prevention. Prior to her appointment at the AAMC, Dr. Danoff was Associate Dean, Undergraduate Medical Education and Student Affairs and Professor of Medicine at McGill University.

Anne C. Beal, MD, MPH
Senior Program Officer
Quality of Care for Underserved Populations
The Commonwealth Fund
1 East 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
Phone: 212-606-3854
Fax: 212-249-1276
E-mail: acb@cmwf.org

Anne Beal, MD, MPH is a Senior Program Officer for the Quality of Care for Underserved Populations component of the Commonwealth Fund. The Commonwealth Fund is a philanthropic organization committed to improving healthcare for vulnerable populations. Dr. Beal served as the Associate Director of the Multicultural Affairs Office at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor in pediatrics at the Harvard University Medical School. Her research interests include social influence on preventive health behaviors for minority populations; developing clinical performance measures for pediatric primary care; adolescent health risk behaviors, and access to care for inner city populations.

Ella Cleveland, PhD
Senior Staff Associate
Division of Community and Minority Programs
Association of American Medical Colleges
2450 North Street
Washington, DC 20037
Phone: 202-828-0531
E-mail: ecleveland@aamc.org

Ella Cleveland, PhD has been a Senior Staff Associate in the Division of Community and Minority Programs at the Association of American Medical Colleges for nearly five years. She is the Project Manager for 26 Health Professions Partnership Initiatives led by medical and other health professions schools, where her main function includes technical assistance on evaluation. She also works with learning specialists in the Minority Medical Education Program to measure non-cognitive variables and awareness of learning styles that can enhance students' applications to medical schools. Dr. Cleveland has been developing and evaluating education projects for nearly thirty years-for the National Science Foundation, Congress through the General Accounting Office, the Psychological Test Corporation, and for the Cleveland Public Schools. She has conducted extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Dr. Cleveland holds a PhD in Education Curriculum from Case Western Reserve University.

Jeannette E. South-Paul, MD
Professor and Chair
Department of Family Medicine
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
3518 5^th Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15261
Phone: 412-383-2378
E-mail: southpaulj@msx.upmc.edu

Jeannette E. South-Paul, MD is Professor and Chair, Department of Family Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Prior to her current position she was a full time faculty member at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda, Maryland. She served as Vice President for Minority Affairs for five years, and then as Professor and Chair of the Department of Family Medicine for 5 1/2 years. Dr. South-Paul is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She completed a family practice residency at the Eisenhower Army Medical Center at Ft. Gordon, Georgia and a faculty development fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She represented the American Academy of Family Physicians as its nominee to the Public Health Service Primary Care Public Policy Fellowship in 1997.

Dr. South-Paul has been involved cultural diversity activities for more than 15 years, serving on committees in the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) which address issues related to underrepresented groups. She helped create the AAFP video teaching tape, "Racial and Ethnic Discrimination in Medicine," served on the AAMC Expanded Minority Admissions Exercise Advisory Committee, and served as the contractor for the Minorities in Medicine report of the Council on Graduate Medical Education published in 1998. She has also served on the Women in Medicine Coordinating Committee of the AAMC and has been the Women's Liaison Officer for the AAMC at the USUHS for 13 years. She now serves on the Association of American Medical Colleges Cultural Competency Task Force and as Senior Advisor to the American Academy of Family Physicians Quality Care for Diverse Populations Project developing a cultural competency teaching module.

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