Grant: IPPH Travel Awards - CPHA Annual Conference

Introduction: Significant gaps exist in the quality of health and healthcare across population groups in Canada and worldwide, with Indigenous and ethnocultural communities being particularly impacted. Cultural adaptation of programs or interventions is one way to take culture into consideration in the service provision in order to improve access to and outcomes of the health and social programs offered to improve their situation. This presentation aims to document the variety of models or frameworks that have been proposed for culturally adapting health and social programs intended for diverse populations. Methods: A systematic search was performed using 3 databases (CINAHL, Medline, and PsycInfo) to identify the academic literature on cultural adaptation models for interventions or programs. Documents were included if they were published between 2009 and 2019 either in English or French. Reference list of the included publications were also screened for additional documents. Findings: Over 20 models or frameworks found in the literature. Most of them were developed and used in the United States to adapt programs intended for Latinos and/or African Americans. Three frameworks were developed in the context of programs for indigenous populations. The models or frameworks help to answer the question 'What to adapt' (content-oriented) and/or 'How to adapt' (process-oriented). Their main limitations are that they focus almost exclusively on the program itself or its immediate context, and they rarely acknowledge organizational and community-level factors. Conclusions and implications: Existing cultural adaptation models and frameworks can assist program developers and implementers in making decisions about what and how to adapt their health and social interventions for diverse populations. Further research is needed to explore the way broader factors such as economic, social, policy, and organizational factors could be considered in such models.