Establishing standards for culturally competent mental health care.

The past 2 decades have witnessed a sharp increase in the global migration of health care providers, along with an increasingly diverse patient population. Since culture fundamentally influences all healthrelated behaviors, an understanding of patient perspectives, values, beliefs, and approaches to health and well-being is critical to ensuring the best possible health outcomes. In addition, providers must be willing to work within these diverse frameworks. When culture is ignored, the results are disparities in outcomes and unequal distribution of mental illness burden. Much work still needs to be done to identify and apply standards for cultural competence in all health care settings where mental health services are provided. Given the multilingual, multiracial, and multicultural needs of an expanding diverse population in the United States, cultural competence is a relevant component to reducing disparities in health care and health outcomes (Echeverri, Brookover, & Kennedy, 2010). Moreover, clinical skills need to be extended to incorporate awareness of health statistics that highlight mental health disparities, training, and crosscultural health care delivery at the individual and system levels (Núñez & Robertson, 2003). Cross-cultural expertise is the ability to work within several cultural systems (i.e., different patients, populations, providers, organizations, community systems) that generate and promulgate their own culture. Cross-cultural expertise also enables one to compare, integrate, and differentiate these cultural systems according to patient goals and needs. Notably, cross-cultural expertise is a vital component to delivering quality mental health care and services, especially in two essential areas: (a) establishing standards for culturally competent mental health care and (b) proposing a global model of cultural competence for mental health providers.