Culturosity: Fostering Cultural Awareness Among Faculty and Residents in a Community Teaching Hospital

Cultural awareness is the first step towards building cultural competence. 'he goal of our study was to evaluate the effect of a cultural awareness intervention among faculty and resi- dents in three residency programs at St. Vincent's Medical Center (SVMC). We conducted a pro- spective interventional quality improvement (Qj) project to study three areas pertaining to cultural awareness -knowledge, attitude, andenvironment, by means of a structured questionnaire adminis- tered at baseline and after intervention. 'The in- tervention consisted of participation in carefully designed bimonthly cultural awareness sessions focusing on one country or region at a time and included an introduction to language, food, music, economics, etc. 'here was a statistically significant difference in pre- and post-intervention responses to the questions pertaining to knowledge about dif- ferent cultures. The intervention was successful in decreasing the knowledge gap significantly and, in the process, also improved the participants' per- ception of the overall cultural experience in the program and hospital.