Cultural Competence: Improving Mental Health

How might developing cultural competence improve mental health services?

The inequalities within the health and social care system are widely recognised (K272, Unit 1, p. 10, K272, Unit 4, p. 79). These inequalities relate to the boundaries within the society and especially communication (Anderson et al, 2003). The disproportions in the multicultural society may be even bigger due to higher number of boundaries and lack of understanding demonstrated by the majority towards minorities. Health and social care services should accommodate everybody’s needs. Mental health services should be developed to promote equality and inclusion and should be available for whole society. Implementing the cultural competence model could be one of the ways to ensure fairness of the mental health services. In this essay we will discuss what the cultural competence is and how to implement it in the metal health services. We will also try to distinguish if the implementation of cultural competence model would improve current services.
Papadopoulos and colleagues in 1998 to ‘help health care workers respond sensitively to patients’ (K272, Unit 4, p. 92). Cultural competence goes further than multiculturalism which focuses on knowledge of different cultures and developing sensitivity to cultural diversity (The Open University, 2010). Cultural competence focuses on the structures and boundaries within the society. According to I. Papadopoulos the knowledge of different cultures promotes tolerance and understanding within society but doesn’t promote the equality (The Open University, 2010 ). Even further the structures of organisations could be enabling people but also the can create boundaries and disabling individuals or groups from accessing the services (The Open University,