Teaching cultural dexterity in surgical care: As essential to a surgeon's skill set as tying a knot

The United States is becoming increasingly diverse, though the surgical workforce has been slow to follow; in 2021, only 6% of general surgeons identified as Black or African American and 7% identified as Hispanic.1 For patients of racial or ethnic minorities, most of their healthcare interactions will be cross-cultural, and provider-level factors such as poor patient-clinical communication leads to lower quality of care and inferior outcomes.2,3 While it is imperative that we actively promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in surgery, we also need to act now by training our surgical workforce to care for patients of diverse racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Teaching surgical trainees to use cultural dexterity to understand individual patients’ attitudes, behaviors, nonverbal cues, and expressions is a worthy endeavor to provide equitable health care to all patients. The PACTS Trial Group was involved in the conceptualization, study design, and data collection of the PACTS Trial.