First steps towards Cultural Competency

Our work on cultural competence began when local communities and those impacted by the Grenfell Tower fire shared with us their experiences, concerns and views on how services could be made more culturally relevant.

Over the last two years, we have worked in partnership with our communities to develop a whole systems approach that seeks to link together many of the influencing factors that lead to culturally-appropriate services. This is multi-layered and complex, so we have been mindful to simplify our approach, to ensure it is thorough and effective.

A key aspect has been the development of a training module on Developing a Culturally Competent General Practice. This module was successfully piloted in 2021/22 and has now secured CPD-accreditation from the Royal College of GPs (RCGPs), which will count towards the CPD-accreditation of GPs.

Training is now being scheduled for all Primary Care staff in North Kensington, with the intent to roll this out to other locations across NHS North West London ICS in the next few months.

Krishna Sarda explains what cultural competency is all about in this video: (1) Introduction to Cultural Competency and why it's important - YouTube