INHE 4009 Week 2 Competence and Humility Comparison Example

Competence and Humility Against Four Criteria: A Concept Comparison That Credits Campinha-Bacote's Model Before Arguing Where Humility Does Better and Where It Does Not

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Walden University

INHE 4009: Cultural Humility and Diversity

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Month Day, Year

Competence and Humility Against Four Criteria: A Concept Comparison That Credits Campinha-Bacote's Model Before Arguing Where Humility Does Better and Where It Does Not

The Two Concepts

Cultural competence, in Campinha-Bacote's widely used model, is a process through which a practitioner continually strives to work effectively within a client's cultural context. The model names five constructs: awareness, knowledge, skill, encounters and desire, each named as a cultural construct in the model (Campinha-Bacote, 2002). Cultural humility, as introduced in a 1998 article on physician training, is a lifelong commitment to self-evaluation and critique, to redressing power imbalances in the practitioner-client relationship and to building partnerships with communities (Tervalon & Murray-García, 1998). This paper compares the two against four criteria set before either is judged.

What the Competence Model Gave the Field

Before the competence movement, much of health care treated cultural difference as a source of noncompliance rather than as something practitioners needed to learn about. Campinha-Bacote's model made culture a professional responsibility with teachable parts. Its first construct, cultural awareness, already asks practitioners to examine their own biases, and it treats competence as something practitioners keep working toward, never a finish line. Critics who describe competence as a checklist of facts about groups are describing poor teaching of the model, not the model itself.

The Four Criteria

Table 1

Two concepts compared on four criteria fixed in advance

Criteria were chosen for their importance to client care and to training programs, before either concept was assessed.

Humility does better on two criteria. It names power directly, which the competence model leaves implicit, and it lowers the risk of stereotyping by treating every client as the authority on their own culture. Competence does better on teachability: a program can teach and assess cultural skill and knowledge in ways it cannot easily assess a lifelong stance.

Where Each Falls Short

The competence model's weak point is its cultural knowledge construct, which in practice often becomes lists of beliefs attributed to whole groups. Kleinman and Benson (2006) argued that such lists can reinforce stereotypes and should give way to asking patients what matters to them. Humility's weak point is vagueness: without concrete skills attached, it can become an attitude that is easy to claim and hard to verify.

The Argument

On these four criteria, humility is the better guiding stance for individual encounters, because it starts with self-critique and treats the client as the authority. But it needs the competence model's skills to be teachable. The strongest training would pair humility as the stance with competence's skills, especially communication and the practice of asking, rather than replace one with the other.

References

Campinha-Bacote, J. (2002). The process of cultural competence in the delivery of healthcare services: A model of care. Journal of Transcultural Nursing, 13(3), 181-184. https://doi.org/10.1177/10459602013003003

Kleinman, A., & Benson, P. (2006). Anthropology in the clinic: The problem of cultural competency and how to fix it. PLoS Medicine, 3(10), Article e294. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030294

Tervalon, M., & Murray-García, J. (1998). Cultural humility versus cultural competence: A critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 9(2), 117-125. https://doi.org/10.1353/hpu.2010.0233