Abstract:

Introduction:
Over the last decades a number of new trends have been observed in healthcare delivery and medical education worldwide. Increasing academic and workforce mobility, migration, pandemics and other global health challenges have initiated the attempts to redefine health care, reform medical education and revise qualifications needed for healthcare professionals. Being called upon to work in different cultural environments or with diverse populations medical care providers have to be able to extend beyond the scope of their national healthcare approaches. This requires attaining new types of knowledge and developing new skills, which will make healthcare professionals cross-culturally competent and in high demand globally.
The problems of cross- and intercultural competence were addressed by J. Bigby, B. S. Malau-Aduli et al., J. S. Betancourt et al., M. Gates et al., G. S. Strong, M. Marzan et al., etc. Revised curricula have been proposed and their effectiveness assessed. However, amendments made in the syllabi of Russian medical schools to train experts in cross-cultural care still remain uncharted. This problem is getting increasingly important with regard to rising numbers of overseas students arriving to study medicine in Russia and claiming higher internationally accepted standards of education.
The objective of this study was to reveal how overseas students originating from different cultural backgrounds and doing courses in Russian medical schools assess the adjustments introduced in their universities' curricula to develop cross-cultural competence, which will enable them to face global healthcare challenges.

Methodology:
The study employed a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques. Primarily, a systematic review of the publications shedding light on the current approaches to domains and skills embraced by cross-cultural competence and ways of its development was made. At the next stage a survey involving senior overseas students to find out how their expectations for “getting global” had been met by the curriculum adjustments was performed. To carry out these surveys, students of three Russian universities were recruited. The numerical data were obtained and processed using Google Sheets and MS Excel Spreadsheet software.

Results:
The study has elucidated the domains and skills, which constitute cutting-edge medical curricula aiming at developing cross-cultural competence but have been either completely neglected or insufficiently attended to in Russian medical schools.
The findings have also demonstrated that there is still a significant cultural bias in constructing a medical curriculum in Russian universities as domestic approaches are mainly incorporated in the curricula. This may become a source of students’ dissatisfaction as it may result in a failure to critically assess and accommodate to healthcare delivery diversity and account for their incapacity to perform in different cultural medical contexts.

Conclusions:
A lack or insufficient coverage of cross-cultural aspects by the Russian medical curricula as exemplified by three medical universities has highlighted the need for redefining the global strategies of healthcare education and revising the curricula as overseas students getting training in Russian medical universities will have to fit into different cultural healthcare contexts and deal with diverse populations.

Keywords:

Cross-cultural competence, medical curriculum, overseas students, cultural bias, diverse cultural healthcare contexts.