Planning to Attend the Quality Healthcare for Culturally Diverse Populations Conference?

The Sixth National Conference on Quality Healthcare for Culturally Diverse Populations will take place September 21-24 this year in Minneapolis, MN.

The theme for this year’s event is “Partnerships for the Future: Supporting Practitioners and Advancing the Field through Innovation, Policy, and Research.” The conference website has been updated recently with information about key themes, presentations, speakers, and other offerings. The conference this year will feature “over 150 presentations during pre-conference intensive training sessions, plenary panels, roundtable sessions, concurrent workshops, a film festival and a resource center with exhibits and poster presentations.”

The conference organizers have designed the event to attract a wide range of attendees, including national health policy leaders, healthcare providers, and well-known experts in cultural competence practice and policy, who view the conference as “an opportunity to share ideas with and lend moral support” to practitioners, activists, and other professional committed to providing high quality healthcare to diverse patients populations.

Attendees can participate in interactive plenary and workshop presentations that “highlight innovative strategies by reviewing the status of interventions discussed at previous conferences and reporting on ‘next phase’ findings.” The skills-building, informational, and plenary sessions cover topics ranging from “the appropriate use of bilingual staff and interpreters to designing and assessing cultural competence training programs for healthcare professionals.” Separate sessions devoted to organizational cultural competence, linguistic access, measurement and assessment, policy and research, and cultural competence training are also scheduled.

The conference website states that this year’s event will focus on three main objectives:

• Addressing the needs and concerns that affect day-to-day practice at the clinical, organizational and community level. For those working at the front lines of the field, this includes those issues that affect job performance, management, quality of service delivery, and overall acceptance of cultural competence/disparity reduction interventions.
• Continuing the integration of cultural competence/disparity reduction into mainstream healthcare priorities. These include improving access to services and insurance, embedding cultural competence/disparity reduction within all aspects of the quality improvement agenda, long-term financing concerns, pay-for-performance, and health care and information technology advances.
• Developing a vision for advancing the field. What work is needed to refine, consolidate, and advance the field and its practice areas? What are the key needs of the field in practice, policy, and research? What standardization is necessary, and where are new approaches and practices required?

Registration information is available here.

A draft agenda has been posted online here, with a full listing of scheduled pre-conference sessions here.

General information on each session type can be found here.

Visit the main conference program page for links to more information on presentation formats, plenary presenters, and more.

Are MDNG: Focus on Multicultural Healthcare readers planning to attend this event? If so, e-mail tkunkler@mdng.com. We’re interested in potential contributing authors who would like to write about their opinions and experiences in the pages of our magazine.