Military culture awareness and competence in counseling: Insights from counselors, supervisors and UK navy and marine beneficiaries of counseling

Abstract

Military cultural competency (MCC) is increasingly recognized as essential for building trust and delivering effective care to military-connected individuals. Unlike the US, in the UK context military families receive support from practitioners who do not have formal training in military cultural competence and military identity is not systematically captured or considered in service provision. This structural difference creates a unique opportunity to study how military families engage with civilian services in a system that does not routinely recognize or accommodate their military status. This paper discusses the findings on culture awareness and competence of UK civilian professionals offering counseling to military families, from multi-informant perspectives of military beneficiaries of counseling (n = 40), counselors (n = 64) and supervisors (n = 14), using a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative survey data using an adapted version of the Military Cultural Competence Assessment Scale (Nedegaard & Zwilling, 2017), with structured qualitative evaluations. The findings highlight the importance of counselors having specific knowledge of the military population. This is the first study of this kind in the UK, thereby addressing important gaps in knowledge, policy, and practice regarding the effective provision of counseling to military families. The UK context provides a “natural experiment” for considering the importance of MCC in delivering therapeutic outcomes and as such, the study makes a significant contribution to international debates on culturally responsive care for military-connected populations.