RESUMEN

The purpose of the paper is to examine the effectiveness of a six-week, culturally sensitive, church-based health-promotion intervention in increasing nutrition label health literacy and health-promoting behaviors (i.e., healthy eating, healthy drinking, and physical activity) and improving weight and blood pressure among Black adults. Study participants are a sample of 321 Black adult churchgoers (N = 321) who were divided between an intervention group (N = 172) and a wait-list control group (N = 149). The health-promotion intervention program is informed by Health Self-Empowerment Theory. At post-test, the participants in the intervention group demonstrated significantly greater increases in nutrition label health literacy, overall level of engagement in health-smart behaviors, and levels of engagement in two specific health-smart behaviors (i.e., healthy eating and healthy drinking) compared with those in the wait-list control group. Implications of these findings for future similar health-promotion intervention programs and research are discussed.

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RESUMEN

BACKGROUND: Patient-centered culturally sensitive health care (PC-CSHC) is a best practice approach for improving health-care delivery to culturally diverse populations and reducing health disparities. Despite patients' report that cultural sensitivity by health-care office staff is an important aspect of PC-CSHC, the majority of available research on PC-CSHC focuses exclusively on health-care providers. This may be due in part to the paucity of instruments available to assess the cultural sensitivity of health-care office staff. The objective of the present study is to determine the psychometric properties of the Tucker-Culturally Sensitive Health Care Office Staff Inventory-Self-Assessment Form (T-CSHCOSI-SAF). This instrument is designed to enable health-care office staff to self-assess their level of agreement that they display behaviors and attitudes that culturally diverse patients have identified as office staff cultural sensitivity indicators. METHODS: A sample of 510 health-care office staff were recruited at 67 health-care sites across the United States. These health-care office staff anonymously completed the T-CSHCOSI-SAF and a demographic data questionnaire. RESULTS AND LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Confirmatory factor analyses of the T-CSHCOSI-SAF revealed that this inventory has 2 factors with high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's αs= .916 and .912). CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS: The T-CSHCOSI-SAF is a useful inventory for health-care office staff to assess their own level of patient-centered cultural sensitivity. Such self-assessment data can be used in the development and implementation of trainings to promote patient-centered cultural sensitivity of health-care office staff and to help draw the attention of these staff to displaying patient-centered cultural sensitivity.