Objective:

Background:

The Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI) is a tool  used in psychiatry to understand the impact of culture on a patient’s clinical presentation. The CFI is a 16-question interview that explores a patient’s medical problem in the setting of multiple cultural domains. Studies have shown that the CFI can help build camaraderie between clinicians and patients and may aid the treatment team in understanding the patient’s perspective of their illness. We hypothesize that the CFI has potential to be a resourceful tool in other specialties as well, including neurology. The goal of this pilot study was to assess the feasibility, acceptability, and clinical utility of the CFI on the inpatient neurology service at Maimonides Medical Center (MMC).

Design/Methods:

Cultural Formulation Interviews were conducted with English speaking hospitalized neurology patients and interview summaries were shared with primary treating clinicians. Participating patients and clinicians subsequently completed debriefing Likert-scale instruments(DIP and DIC, respectively) and demographic questionnaires. Debriefing instrument questions were grouped into 3 domains - feasibility, acceptability and clinical utility. Responses to questions were coded as follows: -2 (strongly disagree), -1 (disagree) , +1 (agree) and +2 (strongly agree). CFI feasibility, acceptability and clinical utility were assessed using mean scores.

Results:

23 patients participated in the CFI, 19 patients completed the DIP and 13 clinicians completed the DIC for 19 of the patient encounters. The average scores for the debriefing instrument questions were >1 across all domains for both patients and clinicians.

Conclusions:

Preliminary data illustrates that the CFI is feasible, acceptable and clinically useful in neurology. Our initial findings support use of the CFI on the neurology service.  Future work may demonstrate applicability of this  tool in other disciplines.