Recommendations from The National Transcultural Health Conference (Download the PDF file)

Dear Colleagues,

During the summer of 2005 a group of clinicians and administrators met to discuss how to appropriately celebrate the 20^th anniversary of multicultural intervention at the Montreal Children's Hospital where staff members have facilitated contact with the healthcare system for thousands of children and their families from many countries. These teams' experiences (Transcultural Psychiatry, Multiculturalism Services and Multicultural Clinic) indicated that a great majority of immigrant families valued their work in providing interpretation services and sensitizing clinicians to some of the culturally specific needs of individual children and their families. This suggested that we as an institution had learned much about concrete culture based challenges and were now ready to share and expand on these experiences with others and to identify more effective models of healthcare provisions across cultures.

The group realized early on that better strategies to guide and support national networks of diversity and intercultural expertise must involve administrators, policy makers and planners in addition to clinicians and other front-line non-medical healthcare professionals. This was based on the recognition that progress in decreasing the inherent challenges immigrants and members of cultural minorities face when they encounter the health care system cannot be accomplished alone. A small group of committed cultural mediators may or may not reflect the philosophy or priorities of the institution and could be sidetracked by administrative fiat.

Following discussions of collective ideas with national groups, including members of the National Consortium on Cultural Competency in Pediatric Health Care, we went ahead and hosted a national conference on transcultural health entitled "Advancing Knowledge, Strategy and Connectedness in Healthcare across Cultures" which took place in Montreal on May 10 and 11, 2007. A number of well-known speakers were invited who had thought about and/or studied issues pertinent to developing racism awareness in institutions, ways to equalize the power differential between the health care provider and the immigrant or the patient from a cultural/visible minority, as well as how to teach these issues to others and create more valid and reliable data. The conference provided unique information on the above-mentioned topics from a wide range of front line practitioners, as well as minority patients. It also allowed us to use their collective experience and wisdom to provide a head start in plans for furthering goals to create a more culturally informed health care system.

The event drew a multidisciplinary group of more than 200 participants from all corners of Canada. There were 3 plenary sessions by local and national experts and 9 other presentations, as well as 28 posters dealing with more specialized topics. On the second day of the conference, we arranged a 2-hour sit-down lunch for all participants and asked them to choose one of 20 tables where the discussions, under the guidance of a moderator, dealt with one of 5 main topics (Developing Racism Awareness in Policy, Administration and Practice; Representing these parameters in Research; Teaching and Practicing Cultural Safety; Equalizing the Clinical Encounter; Creating and Advancing Diversity Knowledge). All participants engaged in the discussions and were deeply satisfied at being actively involved in the policy process. Each table summarized the major points of their discussion and a chosen spokesperson reported them to Professor Laurence Kirmayer and the other participants.

After the conference, the two co-chairs (Dr. K. Minde and M. Serdynska, BSW) and Professor Laurence Kirmayer spent a good deal of time transforming the opinions and ideas expressed in the discussions into a coherent narrative and specific recommendations for Diversity Education. These can now form basic building blocks for future planning and practice. We are initially sending these recommendations to various groups and government as well as non-government authorities that morally, practically and financially supported the conference. We also intend to use these ideas in outreach to other partners to help build a consensus about the structures necessary to institutionalize them into day-to-day reality in all healthcare institutions in Canada. This consensus will include the Charles Taylor and Gérard Bouchard Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d'accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles (CCPARDC).

Sincerely,