The challenges of integrating cultural competence into undergraduate medical curricula across Europe: experience from the C2ME “Culturally competent in medical education” project

Abstract

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Providing high quality care to socially and culturally diverse populations is challenging. Many organizations concerned with quality and equity in health care have called for physician training in cross cultural communication as one strategy for ensuring patient-centered health care for all, but little is known about how to effectively and sustainably integrate such teaching into the medical school curriculum.The C2ME "Culturally Competent in Medical Education" is a European project whose aim was to contribute to the integration of cultural competence teaching in undergraduate medical curricula across Europe. In order to foster exchange among medical schools about cultural competence training, C2ME organized a symposium at the 2014 European Association for Communication in Health Care (EACH) conference. The symposium highlighted the variety of teaching approaches and methods that are used to teach cultural competence as well as the the institutional challenges that make integration of cultural competence into the curricula difficult. There is a need for greater exchange of experiences and best practices among European medical schools to overcome these challenges.