Prioritizing and measuring social awareness within cultural competence education: An act to mitigate health disparities

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

As the population of the United States is diversifying, the prevalence of cross-cultural scenarios in healthcare is increasing. Cross-cultural healthcare interactions contribute to health disparities among underrepresented populations. Cultural competence education is an identified strategy to mitigate these health disparities. Awareness remains a central construct in many frameworks to mitigate health disparities. Therefore, the problem that was addressed by this study was the identified need to promote awareness in physical therapy programs as a strategy to mitigate health disparities among underrepresented populations. The purpose of this quantitative pre-test, post-test quasi-experimental study was to measure Doctor of Physical Therapy students’ social awareness before and after completing an awareness-based educational module. The results of this study indicate that an awareness-based module did not impact Doctor of Physical Therapy students’ eight forms of social awareness. However, there were significant changes in some between and within-group comparisons for six forms of social awareness.