Quality IMPACT

Cultural Competence Priority Project:

Improving Cultural Competence in Mental Health Treatment Programs

• • Project Background
• • Project Tools
• • First Year
• • Second Year
• • Additional Resources
• • Project Findings
• • Provider Generated Documents
• • Participating Providers

Project Background

Rationale

It is recognized that there is a need to increase cultural competence in mental health and chemical dependency services to address the disparity in access and quality of care for individuals from varied racial and ethnic groups. The goal of this project is to better meet the mental health need and chemical dependency treatment need of New York City's diverse community.

Aim

Cultural competence is a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a program to enable that program to work effectively with a diverse population. A cultural group can be defined on the basis of its age, gender, race, ethnicity, country of origin, language, sexual orientation or disability.

The project's objectives are to increase admissions of adults of a particular cultural group, which the program determines to be underserved, and to improve the assessment and treatment of adults in the program by identifying relevant cultural factors as an integral component of the treatment planning process.

 Development

This CQI project was developed through a consensus-building process initiated in 2004. National experts were consulted and a workgroup of local stakeholders (community providers, consumers, advocates, family members and DOHMH staff) met regularly to help design this project. The workgroup developed a demographic information survey, to be completed by consumers, as well as the City-Wide Cultural Assessment (CCA), a brief cultural assessment instrument

Implementation

To help in choosing a cultural group to target, participating programs will be provided with demographic profiles of its community (City, Borough and Community Districts). As an option, the program may choose to conduct a survey of enrolled consumers using a survey instrument developed by the Division of Mental Hygiene (DMH) and local stakeholders to gather demographic information about current consumers. The survey can be completed by the consumers themselves and is available in five languages (Chinese, Haitian Creole, Korean, Russian, and Spanish) in addition to English. A program can use these or other data sources to select a target group. DMH will provide programs with a list of suggested interventions to improve access (e.g., outreach, community education).

To identify important cultural factors that could affect treatment planning, participating programs will be provided with a brief cultural assessment instrument, the City-Wide Cultural Assessment (CCA). The CCA, which was developed by DMH and local stakeholders, is to be used during every client intake and can be combined with any other cultural assessment that the program is already conducting. To facilitate effective use of the CCA, a training video, Asking Questions: A cultural assessment tool and a training guide, Facilitator's Guide To The Video, will be distributed to all programs. When important cultural factors relevant to treatment planning are identified during intake, recommendations for integrating these factors into treatment must be noted on the CCA. These recommendations and related clinical interventions must also be noted in the consumer's treatment plan.

Programs entering the project for the second year are also asked to expand their cultural competence practice further into other aspects of agency practice. Programs may choose to incorporate the CCA into all treatment plan reviews or work on improving ongoing engagement of their target group. Alternatively, programs may focus their efforts on improving language capacity. DMH has developed indicators for each of these efforts and they are described in the Project Workbook for Year II participants.

back to top

Projects Tools

Citywide Cultural Assessment (CCA) Manual

• CCA Manual

Using the City-Wide Cultural Assessment (CCA) to Develop a Culturally Informed Initial Treatment Plan

• Developing Culturally Informed Treatment Plans

Sample Goals and Objectives for Integrating Culturally-Based Information into Treatment Plan

• Sample Goals and Objective

Consumer Population Surveys

• English Other languages: [ Español ] [ 中文 ] [ 한국어 ] [ Creole ] [ Русский ]

back to top

First Year Participant Project Materials

Workbook

• Cultural Competence Workbook (PDF)

Baseline Data Sheets

• Baseline Individual Tracking Sheet(BITS) (PDF)
• Baseline Data Sheet (Excel)

Project Data Sheets

• Individual Tracking Sheet(PDF)
• Data Sheet (Excel)

back to top

Second Year Participant Project Materials

Workbook

• Cultural Competence Workbook (PDF)

Project Data Sheets

• Individual Tracking Sheet(PDF)
• Data Sheet (Excel)

Additional Indicator Data Sheets

Language Capacity

• Individual Tracking Sheet (PDF)
• Data Sheet (Excel)

Ongoing Engagement of Target Group

• Individual Tracking Sheet (PDF)
• Data Sheet (Excel)

Treatment Planning

• Individual Tracking Sheet (PDF)
• Data Sheet (Excel)

back to top

Additional Resources

• Cultural Competence Websites (PDF)

back to top

Project Findings

Selected Findings

• Selected Findings (PDF)

Featured Outstanding Projects

• Project 1 (PDF)
• Project 2 (PDF)

back to top

Provider Generated Documents

Root Cause Analysis Shared by Providers

• Root Cause Analyses (PDF)

Promising Interventions

• Promising Interventions (PDF)

back to top

Quality IMPACT Cultural Competency Project Participating Providers '05 to '08

back to top