Background Information
The organization selected for the analysis is the New Harbor Memorial Hospital. The hospital under analysis is a part of Christiana Care Health System, which ranks 22nd in terms of hospital admissions in the US. Christiana Care Health System includes two hospitals with more than 1,100 patient beds, a home health care service, preventive medicine, rehabilitation services, a network of primary care physicians, and an extensive range of outpatient services. Thus, New Harbor Memorial Hospital is an advanced healthcare facility with no identified issues that threaten its financial well-being. However, the organization is facing the problem of the inability to meet the needs of the rapidly growing Latino population. In particular, the hospital is unable to provide culturally and linguistically competent services. As a result, the patient outcomes and satisfaction levels of Latinos and other minority patients are unsatisfactory.
Cross-cultural training intervention is required to improve the level of cultural competence of the medical personnel. Jongen et al. (2018) describe two central approaches to increasing the level of cultural competence. The first approach is called cultural competence training, which presupposes that the medical person is provided with the knowledge of the cultural peculiarities of different cultural groups (Jongen et al., 2018). The effectiveness of this approach is limited, as it divides people into several general groups, which fails to capture the peculiarities of the unique cultures of individuals (Jongen et al., 2018). The second approach is to provide general knowledge about how to provide culture-sensitive care in any cross-cultural situation (Jongen et al., 2018). This approach requires such training includes “eliciting patients’ explanatory models of health issues and their causes; strategies for negotiating shared understanding and facilitating participatory decision-making in creating treatment plans; and understanding health and illness in its biopsychosocial context” (Jongen et al., 2018, p. 2). This approach is associated with less bias, which implies that it would be best to address the identified problem. Thus, cross-cultural training is suggested to address the problem of New Harbor Memorial Hospital.
Research Questions
The intervention will require an evaluation program to understand if the intervention was successful. Every evaluation program needs well-worded research questions tied to the purpose of the research. In the case of the cross-cultural training program in New Harbor Memorial Hospital, the evaluation program will need to identify if the conducted cross-cultural training was effective. There were two measures of success identified: self-reported cross-cultural efficacy and minority patients’ satisfaction. Thus, the purpose of the evaluation program is to assess if the cross-cultural program conducted in New Harbor Memorial Hospital had a significant positive effect on the self-reported cross-cultural efficacy of the hospital staff and minority patient satisfaction.
The purpose statement can be transformed into two research questions. According to Mattick et al. (2018), “a good research question will send the researcher on a quest to identify or collect data that can be analyzed and interpreted” (p. 105). Additionally, Mattick et al. (2018) claim that research questions should be very specific so that they can be answered in a short time frame. Thus, program evaluation will be guided by research questions listed below:
RQ1: Does the cross-cultural training program have a significant impact on minority patients’ satisfaction levels?
RQ2: Does the cross-cultural training program have a significant impact on self-perceived cross-cultural efficacy?
These questions are very narrow yes/no questions that can be answered through careful data collection and analysis. Moreover, the questions are closely connected to the purpose of the evaluation, and they encourage the collection and analysis of data to answer them. Thus, the provided research questions appear to be appropriate for the evaluation program.
Evaluation Design
One of the most frequently used research designs in evaluation programs is the pre-experimental design (Arora et al., 2019). This approach implies gathering pretest and posttest data utilizing statistical analysis to understand if the intervention had a statistically significant effect on the dependent variables. First, the satisfaction level of minority patients’ will be measured before and after the intervention. Second, the self-perceived level of cross-cultural efficacy will be measured before and after the intervention. Statistical analysis will be performed to understand if the cross-cultural intervention had a significant impact on the dependent variables. A statistically significant improvement with a large enough effect size will demonstrate the success of the cross-cultural program.
The proposed research design is associated with significant benefits, such as simplicity and low cost, which can be crucial for researchers with a small budget and limited experience. However, the research design is associated with significant drawbacks. For instance, the design does not control for many extraneous factors, which are associated with significant threats to validity, as it is difficult to dismiss a rival hypothesis (Evaluation Toolkit, n.d.). As for the reliability of the method, pre-experimental design is not associated with special threats. However, it would be crucial to use large samples of data to ensure the consistency of measurements.
References
Arora, S., Deosthali, P. B., & Rege, S. (2019). Effectiveness of a counseling intervention implemented in antenatal setting for pregnant women facing domestic violence: a pre‐experimental study. BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 126, 50-57.
Evaluation Toolkit. (n.d.). Choose an evaluation design. Web.
Jongen, C., McCalman, J., & Bainbridge, R. (2018). Health workforce cultural competency interventions: a systematic scoping review. BMC Health Services Research, 18(1), 1-15.
Mattick, K., Johnston, J., & de la Croix, A. (2018). How to… write a good research question. The Clinical Teacher, 15(2), 104-108.