Cultural Competence among Italian Public Health Professionals. In Symposium "Cultural Competence: Cross Cultural Perspectives and Emerging Paradigms (USA-Italy-Espana)"

In Italy migration from abroad is a quite recent and less steady experience, so a low sensitivity and few specific trainings in Public Health Organizations still appear. Improve cultural competences is therefore a community need. Aim: Explorative research on Cultural Competences in Italian public health professionals. Participants: N. 175 hospital and rehabilitation nurses, working in Italian Public Health Service. Instruments: Questionnaire ad hoc to collect data about socio-demographic information, CCAI (Suarez-Balcazar et al, 2008) Italian translation, Scale of Sense of Coherence (Antonovsky, 1993), Scale of Organizational Empowerment (Spreitzer, 1995), Semantic Differential about Perceived Emotions in Multicultural Relationships (ad hoc). Results Compared with original version, Italian adaptation obtained two factors: a) Self-awareness and individual skills, b) Organizational support for multicultural competence . The Self-awareness and individual skills positively correlates with two O.E. subscales (Meaning, Self-Determination), and Positive Perceived Emotions, and negatively with Negative Perceived Emotions. The Organizational support for multicultural competence is associated with Negative Perceived Emotions.