Annual Cultural Competency Plans

Our program leadership and staff recognize that we live in a culturally rich and varied state and serve diverse clients and families. Moreover, inequalities in the availability, access, and quality of mental health care related to socio-cultural factors are widely recognized problems throughout the United States. We believe that increasing cultural competency is one way to decrease these disparities while building capacity to provide quality services to diverse populations. Therefore, all SBHG agencies develop an Annual Cultrual Competency Plan to increase our ability to function effectively as individual practitioners and as an organization within the context of the cultural beliefs, values, behaviors, needs, and strengths presented by our clients, their families, and their communities.

Our Annual Cultural Competency Plan is developed as part of our Total Quality Management program and includes three components:

1. Training: Staff must participate in at least one cultural competency training annually and service staff must attend at least one additonal training focused on a cultural group in the service population.

2. Basic Practices: The following basic cultural competency practices are monitored and maintained:
   • Written policies and procedures on cultural and linguistic competency;
   • Translations of consumer documents in county threshold languages; and,
   • Human resource recruitment and retension strategies to assure staff diversity that reflects the service population.
   
   
3. Elective Projects: Each SBHG agency identifies and works on an elective project annually to advance the cultural competency of staff and/or the organization. Examples include:
   • Increasing staff sensitivity to cultural issues and their personal development as multi-culturally competent providers through supervision protocols, peer reviews, and ground rounds;
   • Increasing the voice of youth and families from different cultural groups through participation in agency processes - including team decision making, focus groups, quality councils and peer-to-peer services; and,
   • Building collaborative relationships with culturally diverse community-based organizations for effecting referrals and partnerships in service delivery.