Health and mental health organizations, whether public or private, need to be able to serve culturally diverse consumer populations. If management is unaware of the specific cultures in the organization’s catchment area, and is unable to assess the specific service needs and preferences of those populations, the services will be underutilized and the organization may fail to get market share.

Moreover, the U.S. health care workforce has become increasingly culturally diverse in the last two decades. This diversity is due to the increase in immigration of a vast number of health care personnel from other countries and the large number of persons who remain in this country after they have received training in many of the health care fields.

Because people’s attitudes toward work and proper relationships with fellow employees and management also differ cross-culturally, cultural perspectives may impact workplace dynamics in unanticipated and challenging ways. A culturally aware manager or administrator will be alert to these possibilities.

Perhaps deeper self-knowledge and awareness of diverse cultural perspectives would not be necessary if we lived our lives in one small place interacting with the same small group of people for all of our lives as did some of our ancestors. But that is not the world in which most of us now live. We live in a shrinking world in which people from varying cultures interact on a daily basis, one in which the larger nations are composed of people from very different backgrounds.

Cultural awareness thus is a professional mindset essential for successful interaction in the multicultural health and mental health care environments.

Let us then take a closer look at culture.