Project background
About 16 of the 82 million people living in Germany have a migration background. This cultural and linguistic diversity becomes a source of social and economic gains.
On the other hand this diversity poses a challenge for the psychosocial health care. In the 1980s the WHO postulated in the Ottawa Charta that healthcare should be based on the cultural needs of the patients and should be created in a respectful and sensitive way.
Numerous studies point out the difficulty in achieving these goals. One example of these findings is that the migratory status is associated with low utilization rate of health care services in comparison with the autochthonous population. This is the case in the ambulatory as well as in the stationary psychosocial care (Mösko et al., 2012).
Another study shows that psychosocial treatments for Turkish patients from the former Yugoslav have the lowest treatment successes (Mösko et al., 2011).
Different factors have been discussed as possible barriers to equal access to mental health care and for worse treatment outcome.
Divergent cultural beliefs and practices concerning diseases and communication difficulties can hinder the psychotherapeutic treatment as well as factors on the part of the healthcare providers like prejudices or uncertainty in dealing with migrants.
The findings of a study by Wohlfahrt and collegues (2006) illustrate that half of the employees in a psychiatric department have negative feelings in the contact with a foreign patient. These feelings handicap the relationship building as well as the success of the treatment.
Also a study on licensed psychotherapists demonstrates that treating patients with a migration background can be challenging. Despite years of working experience, two-thirds of the respondents reported substantial challenges in the psychotherapeutic work with these patients (e.g. divergent values, lack of compliance) (Mösko et al., 2012).
In the face of a growing number of patients who are culturally and linguistically diverse cross-cultural competence is becoming more and more a basic requirement for psychotherapists. Therefore cross-cultural issues should be more considered in basic, further and advanced training for psychotherapists. For this purpose it is necessary to develop well-funded and evaluated cross-cultural trainings. These trainings can be helpful for practicing psychotherapists and psychotherapist in training in getting more comfortable with cross-cultural issues and in better dealing to the needs of their patients with migration background.
In order to judge the quality of a given training empirical based guidelines are indispensable. These guidelines are also important for the long-term quality assurance of the basic, further and advanced training for psychotherapists. Even though these cross-cultural competence training guidelines already exist in the United States and in Canada, such an instrument has not been available so far in the German language area. With the present project we will able to fill this gap.
Projektteam
