DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Racial and ethnic minority Americans receive lower quality health care than non-minorities in the U.S. These disparities are evident across a wide range of health care services, including the care of diabetes mellitus. Cultural competence (CC) training has become the principal vehicle adopted by the health professions to address healthcare disparities. CC has been widely endorsed and deployed in the U.S., but there is little consistency to what is offered in CC programs and little evidence that CC training as currently delivered is improving health care quality or equity as intended. Given the substantial resources and time being devoted to CC training, it is critical that CC programs are informed by evidence about what will improve the ability of providers and healthcare teams to deliver high-quality care equitably, across diverse patient populations. This project builds on prior work that: 1) defined CC among health professionals by producing a conceptual map of CC dimensions from a systematic review of conceptual frameworks; 2) used that conceptual map to develop an instrument measuring CC among primary care providers (PCPs); and 3) demonstrated that CC, as measured by the instrument, was associated with higher quality care for African American patients, and reduced racial disparity. This project will extend the study of CC beyond PCPs to include other Patient Aligned Care Team (PACT) members, and attempt to discern why higher CC is associated with more equitable care, specifically, what high CC providers are doing differently in their clinical encounters that results in higher quality care for African American patients. The aims of the study are to: 1. Understand differences in patient-provider communication among high and low CC primary care providers. 2. Understand patients' perceptions of their interactions and relationships with high and low CC providers/PACTs. 3. Understand the contribution of CC among providers/PACTs to quality and equity of diabetes care. These aims will be addressed using a mixed-methods approach that will include quantitative and qualitative analysis of communication behaviors observed in audiotaped clinical encounters, coupled with quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews of patients about their perceptions of the encounters and their relationships with their PCPs and PACT members. The study will be conducted in 4 VA Medical Centers. A target sample of 50 PCPs will be recruited, 25 high and 25 low on self-assessed CC. PACT teamlet members working with these PCPs will be recruited. Patients with diabetes from each PCP's primary care panel will be recruited, with a target of 5 African American and 5 white patients per PCP. Patients' visits to their PCPs will be audio- recorded and the dialogue then coded for communication content using validated communication coding systems that evaluate different types of communication behaviors. Differences in communication by ...