The impact of Linking Immigrants with Nutrition Knowledge (LINK) initiative on improving cultural competency skills among nutrition and dietetic students in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background The health of culturally diverse newcomers to Canada declines rapidly in the first few years post migration primarily due to the onset of chronic diseases which is often related to poor dietary habits. On the other hand, nutrition and dietetic students usually do not have the chance to be exposed to other cultures to increase their cultural competency skills and provide nutritional advice while dealing with language barrier and/or traditional believes and practices that may interfere to healthy eating. Methods From 2011, we have designed and implemented a hands‐on project “Linking Immigrants with Nutrition Knowledge (LINK)” as a part of Food, Culture and Nutrition course where we pair groups of two nutrition students with an immigrant or refugee family. They were involved in several purposeful activities throughout the four‐month project. We used mixed‐methods design to evaluate the impact of LINK on cultural competency of students, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In quantitative analyses, we evaluated cultural competency skills of students before and after LINK within the last four years through a standard cultural competency questionnaire. Descriptive and regression analyses, controlling for potential confounders, were conducted. In qualitative component, we collected information and perspectives of students, former students who are currently practicing as dietitians and preceptors with regards to the impact of LINK project on their practice after graduation. Results After the LINK project, there was a considerably significant increase in odds of higher levels of cultural competency knowledge, skills and encounters (p <0.05) among students compared to before enrollment in LINK. From year to year, there is an increase in odds of high attitude vs. medium and vs. low attitude. The qualitative data are in complete agreement with the quantitative results. Conclusion Students in health disciplines are expected to have skills for effective communication and interaction with clients from a divers ethno‐cultural backgrounds. Projects that provide real‐life experience, such as LINK, are essential in increasing nutrition students’ cultural competency knowledge, skills and encounter/situation in today's multi‐cultural societies. Support or Funding Information University of Saskatchewan, Government of Saskatchewan
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".