Mackinnon Smith

Professor Helen Brown

H&S: Community Health
Cultural Competency Skills Artifact

My first artifact of Cultural Competency Skills that I chose to use as my evidence of growth is a
synopsis paper on the interview I conducted with a public health mentor I was assigned. This
paper is different than the one in the Leadership & Systems Thinking Skills evidence tab,
because in this paper I focus more on how my assigned mentor works with different cultures
and is able to use different organizations to reach those communities. In this paper I list the
questions that I asked regarding cultural competency, her response, and finally how I plan to
apply them to my career. I believe that this assignment allowed to me to grow in my knowledge
of reaching out to different cultures and accessing organizations that have already established a
relationship with that community. I became more confident in my knowledge of the sub-
Competency domain, “Describe the ways diversity may influence policies, programs, services,
and the health of a community” which was one of the areas that I wanted to grow in. I was
curious about how St. Luke’s is able to reach a wide range of cultural diversity due to the large
amount of population growth in Idaho, but more specifically Boise. After this mentor interview
I’m able to better understand how to find data and statistics on a certain community, rather
than just generalizing the data. I plan on using this knowledge to think outside the box in
creating effective programs and to always think about the missing pockets of populations.

Mentor Interview Questions:

1. How do you handle/utilize the different cultures in the Boise area?
2. What program thru the St. Luke’s Community Health Department do you think is most
utilized? And why do you think that is?

Mentor Interview Answers:

When I asked Angie Gribble, Community Health Manager at St. Luke’s Regional Hospital, about
how she is able to incorporate and include the different cultures in Boise in her work she had a
very interesting, yet honest answer. She said that she usually addresses and consults with the
community volunteers and the board that has been established in a community to discuss what
would be beneficial for the community. However, she and St. Luke’s have recognized that these
boards aren’t necessarily representative of those who have had the lived experience that the
board or Angie are addressing. Angie is currently facing the question of “how do we that
experience on the board? How do we find those people?” When I followed up with my second
question from above, Angie explained to me that a major aspect of the St. Luke’s Community
Health Department is to work with pre-established organizations that have already created a
reputation in the community. By working with these organizations, St. Luke’s isn’t having to
build a program from scratch, but rather works in partnership with an organization that has the
same goals and objectives as them. Angie related this method back to their impact on the
cultures in Idaho by explaining to me how she will often find out which organizations are
prevalent and have created a trusting relationship with the community. Once she is able to find
these organizations and establishes a beneficial partnership with them, she is then able to have
people in certain positions on the ground in those communities that can give her quality
feedback. Angie also explained that she will find these under-represented communities by
looking at statistics that don’t necessarily raise any red flags but will look at pockets and
neighborhoods in that data to find the red flags for that area. An example of this is two
neighborhoods in Boise in the same zip-code that are very different in their health equity, so
the overall picture won’t raise any concern, until you zoom in on the differences between the
two neighborhoods and see that one has a lower annual income, lower SES, and health
differences than the other.

Summary:
From this part of the interview I learned that there is always a need to investigate the
data I’m given, find creative ways to establish a presence in the different cultures in a
community, and to be open to new ideas and honest with myself on the outreach my
organization is able to provide. From this interview with Angie, I became more aware of the
difficulties one can face in finding effective ways with including diversity in order to establish
and implement programs that are able to target that population. Not having the lived
experience of every culture is a fact of life, that’s why it’s super important to understand how
diversity of a community can influence various aspects of public health.