Resumo

OSORIO-MERCHAN, May Bibiana  e  LOPEZ DIAZ, Alba Lucero. Cultural competence in health: a growing need in a globalized world. Index Enferm [online]. 2008, vol.17, n.4, pp.266-270. ISSN 1699-5988.

Here we analyze cultural competence from a critical and practical view within the context of transcultural nursing and developments from other disciplines such as Phonoaudiology, Physiotherapy, Medicine, Psychology and Social Work. From a practical sense, cultural competence is considered as an integrating process of cultural consciousness, knowledge, skills, findings and cultural wishes with the purpose of offering tools to identify the professional’s own culture and to build treatment proposals involving the ways these people deal with health/disease processes, and thus conducing to higher probability of success in health promotion, prevention, and rehabilitation. We show the relevance of theses issues to different health professionals from Latin American countries where ethnic diversity is high and different regions within these countries have particular modes of conceiving the world and that to build differents ways these people deal with health/disease processes.

Palavras-chave : cultural competence; ethnic diversity; culture; culture and health.