Residents' Attitude, Knowledge, and Perceived Preparedness Toward Caring for Patients from Diverse Sociocultural Backgrounds.

Training residents to deliver care to increasingly diverse patients in the United States is an important strategy to help alleviate racial and ethnic disparities in health outcomes. Cross-cultural care training of residents continues to present challenges. This study sought to explore the associations among residents' cross-cultural attitudes, preparedness, and knowledge about disparities to better elucidate possible training needs. This cross-sectional study used web-based questionnaires from 2013 to 2014. Eighty-four internal medicine residency programs with 954 residents across the United States participated. The main outcome was perceived preparedness to care for sociocultural diverse patients. Regression analysis showed attitude toward cross-cultural care (beta coefficient [β]=0.57, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.49-0.64, <0.001) and report of serving a large number of racial/ethnic minorities (β=0.90, 95% CI: 0.56-1.24, <0.001), and low-socioeconomic status patients (β=0.74, 95% CI: 0.37-1.10, <0.001) were positively associated with preparedness. Knowledge of disparities was poor and did not differ significantly across postgraduate year (PGY)-1, PGY-2, and PGY-3 residents (mean scores: 56%, 58%, and 55%, respectively; =0.08). Residents' knowledge of health and healthcare disparities is poor and does not improve during training. Residents' preparedness to provide cross-cultural care is directly associated with their attitude toward cross-cultural care and their level of exposure to patients from diverse sociocultural backgrounds. Future studies should examine the role of residents' cross-cultural care-related attitudes on their ability to care for diverse patients.