Behaviors That Eliminate Health Disparities for Racial and Ethnic Minorities: A Narrative Systematic Review

Within the health care provider-health care recipient relationship the communication must be culturally competent to eliminate barriers to equitable health care for all Americans. This assertion has conceptual grounding in Public Law 106-129 (the Health Care Research and Quality Act of 1999) and Public Law 106-525 (the Minority Health and Health Disparities Research and Education Act of 2000). This narrative systematic review examines this assertion by using selection and exclusion criteria to gather interventions, assessments, and testimonies conducted from 2000-2007. Reports that were not eliminated via these criteria were analyzed to determine the effect of specific practices that were undertaken in interventions, assessments, and testimonies. Which practices does research propose as indispensable to efforts to eliminate health disparities for racial and ethnic minority health care recipients? Findings indicate that culturally competent behaviors by providers and recipients promote effective intercultural communication that eliminates health care disparities, and removes obstacles to care

Say What You Mean: Confronting Ambiguity in Language

The GIFTS activity involves the juxtaposition of denotative and connotative meanings of the same word in order to demonstrate how complex decoding the code and assigning the encoder’s intended meaning to a word can be. Students are randomly put into groups. Students are given the word “dog” and each group uses a dictionary to provide its denotation. Then each group has to generate connotations, cultural or slang meanings for the word “dog.” The class discusses the difference between the two types of meaning, and what impact if any this difference has on interpersonal communication. Then each group chooses a word, provides its denotative and connotative meanings, and determines if the meaning in the word is fixed or not. Then as a class we discuss the meanings of the words. Students realize the meaning words have is never fixed. Therefore, the encoder must consider the audience to reduce ambiguity during decoding