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Category: Project

Description: Cultural competency training promotes healthcare providers’ adoption of practices that reduce health disparities. Despite the importance of these trainings, few incorporate evidence-informed behavior change techniques (BCTs). We developed the Gender-Affirming Psychotherapy Training (GAPT), an 8-hour online, self-paced, BCT-driven training on best practices for providing psychotherapy to transgender youth. Training tools (i.e., strategies that facilitate active learning) included instruction, stories, practice, evaluation, and action plans. This paper describes the BCTs and linked mechanisms in the training to provide a template for incorporating BCTs in the development of cultural competency trainings. The training was comprehensively coded for BCTs and their linked mechanisms of action (MoAs). Frequencies of BCTs and MoAs were calculated. 37 unique BCTs and 22 MoAs were included in the training. The three most common BCTs utilized were information about emotional consequences, information about social and environmental consequences, and demonstration of the behavior. The three most frequently targeted MoAs were attitude towards the behavior, subjective norms, and beliefs about consequences. Among training tools, stories incorporated the most unique BCTs (M=6.7) and targeted the most unique MoAs (M=8.0). Ample BCTs can be incorporated into cultural competency training, and some training tools may be better suited for BCTs. Specifically, stories may be a potent and scalable training tool; they concurrently leverage several BCTs, targeting multiple MoAs. Future research should separately evaluate training tools, their proximal effects on target MoAs, and their more distal effects on provider adoption of culturally competent practices.