%0 Journal Article
%T Cultural diversity teaching and issues of uncertainty: the findings of a qualitative study
%A Nisha Dogra
%A James Giordano
%A Nicholas France
%J BMC Medical Education
%D 2007
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1472-6920-7-8
%X A semi-structured interview was undertaken with 61 stakeholders (including policymakers, diversity teachers, students and users). The data were analysed and themes identified.There were diverse views about what the term cultural diversity means and what should constitute the cultural diversity curriculum. There was a need to provide certainty in teaching cultural diversity with diversity teachers feeling under considerable pressure to provide information. Students discomfort with uncertainty was felt to drive cultural diversity teaching towards factual emphasis rather than reflection or taking a patient centred approach.Students and faculty may feel that cultural diversity teaching is more about how to avoid professional, medico-legal pitfalls, rather than improving the patient experience or the patient-physician relationship. There may be pressure to imbue cultural diversity issues with levels of objectivity and certainty representative of other aspects of the medical curriculum (e.g. ¨C biochemistry). This may reflect a particular selection bias for students with a technocentric orientation. Inadvertently, medical education may enhance this bias through training effects, and accommodate disregard for subjectivity, over-reliance upon technology and thereby foster incorrect assumptions of objective certainty. We opine that it is important to teach students that technology cannot guarantee certainty, and that dealing with subjectivity, diversity, ambiguity and uncertainty is inseparable from the personal dimension of medicine as moral enterprise. Uncertainty is inherent in cultural diversity so this part of the curriculum provides an opportunity to address the issue as it relates to pateint care.Ambiguity is defined as 1) a double meaning that is either deliberate or caused by inexactness in description, or as 2) an expression that is interpretable in more than one way [1]. Uncertainty is a fact or condition that lacks firm predictability, and can also refer to the co
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/7/8