Cultural Competency And Patient Centeredness: A Case Study

Cultural competency is necessary to provide effective patient-centered care, improve patient outcome, and reduce healthcare disparity. When healthcare providers approach patient care entirely from their own cultural perspectives and beliefs, their decisions and behaviors can negatively impact patient care. Evaluating and acknowledging my own beliefs, values, biases, and prejudices allows me, as a healthcare professional, to better understand patients’ cultural needs and values.

Critically analyse one of the main challenges, barriers, and enablers for cultural competence in health care when working in a cross-cultural environment.

Cultural competence in health care describes the ability to provide care to patients with diverse values, beliefs and behaviors, including tailoring health care delivery to meet patients’ social, cultural and linguistic needs. The need for healthcare systems to increase cultural competence and personalize care for ethnic patient minorities should not be ignored. Healthcare systems should promote better understanding and communication between diverse ethnic patients and caregivers. Hospitals should design a system that caters to the needs of all the populations they serve and not just apply a one-size-fits-all approach. Becoming a culturally competent health care organization is a critical component in reducing health care disparities.

Culture has more than one definition. It can be defined as the language spoken throughout a group of people or even the beliefs practiced. In the professional field of nursing, nurses are required to do more than administer medication or change bandages on a patient. To be able to fulfill a nurse’s job requirements, a nurse must learn to be culturally competent. Cultural competency in the professional field of nursing means to care and respect the patient whether or not the health care provider is in agreement with the patient’s decisions.

St. Jude's Research Hospital provides an array of services to seriously to terminally ill children. St. Jude's Research Hospital also provides support to the parents, guardians, and families of the children in their care. This paper will describe cultural competency and explain its presence in areas such as health care and education. Cultural competency is one of several key assessments of professional efficacy, especially in areas such as health care and health services. The paper will evaluate the cultural competency of St. Jude's Research Hospital and explain why cultural competency is necessary in the provision of successful modern healthcare.

Miscommunication, medication errors, and lack of compliance commonly occur in the healthcare field. These are just a few of the errors that occur due to the patient being from a different culture than the physician or healthcare worker. Those three errors alone have a huge impact on our healthcare today. If we could have a better understanding of other cultures that are different from our own we could have a dramatic decrease in errors and a great increase in healthcare participation. Training must be completed and must be done in more than one way. The first step is to make sure that all physicians and health care workers get the same nationwide training that focuses on improving cultural competence. How this is completed must be done in more than one way (Horwitz, 2001).

As the diverse populations of the United States (U.S.) continues to grow the need for cultural competency in healthcare delivery requires culturally competent healthcare providers. Each population has its own particular norms and practices that guide their lifestyles; therefore, a challenge arises for health care providers to learn to provide culturally sensitive care to clients from diverse cultural backgrounds (Waite and Calamaro 2010). The ever changing population of the U.S. signifies a much needed change in health care delivery to different cultures. The U.S. Bureau of Census (1992) predicts that by the year 2020 only 53 % of the population will be of white European decent.

Our community is composed of culturally diverse people, and nurses have to take care of these people when they need care. That being said, nurses deal with conflicts of culture, values, or beliefs with their patients. The values conflict I have encountered was when the wife of my dying resident verbalized to no suctioning despite the comfort care orders she agreed and signed. Her husband had increased in secretions and despite the medications administered and oral care provided, his increased in secretions had not ceased causing blockage to his airways thereby making him gasp for air and in pain. His wife believed that suctioning causes pain and offers no benefits. According to Blais and Hayes (2011), I have to “show respect for the client’s support people” (p. 390) although the wife’s belief is not congruent with the

Cultural competency is an important factor when working with patients in health care, however to be culturally competent, is to understand and communicate with your patient to feel cared for and understand that you’re there to help and not judge. Utilizing Cultural competency to your advantage to promote better results with patients that include, participation, learning, and higher attendance.

The importance of Cultural Competency when working with a diverse population within health care is extremely important. It’s a major part of health providers jobs to be respectful and mindful of their patients culture and or background. The health provider should acknowledge the patients beliefs, traditions and religion to be sure the patient is as comfortable as she or she can possibly be. After all the patient is seeking help because he or she is not feeling well or needs some sort of medical attention, so of course it should be the health providers best interest to not but more stress on the patient or make them more uncomfortable then what they already are. There can be a few pitfalls if a health provider completely ignores the patient’s

The nursing profession continues to walk towards excellence in cultural competent delivery of current healthcare needs. In the pursuit of excellence and the love of learning, there are always improvements to be made. Continuing education requirements are the backbone of building nurses into life long learners. Identifying personal areas of growth are an effective mode of continuing to add to existing nursing skills. In this paper, I will identify areas of improvement that I would like to make

Cultural competence requires culture recognition, knowledge and understanding for each individual patients care. “Cultural competence in health care describes the ability of systems to provide care to patients with diverse values, beliefs and behaviors, including tailoring delivery to meet patients’ social, cultural, and linguistic needs” (Betancourt, Green, and Carrillo, p. 5). The ability to deliver culturally

Healthcare has withstood several changes throughout the past few decades, however, healthcare policies are now focused more on empirical evidence rather than patient health care. Recently, I have noticed that there is an increased need for health care providers to incorporate patients culture into various treatments. The article “Patient-Centered, Culturally Sensitive Health Care (PC-CSHC) written by Carolyn M. Tucker, Julia Roncoroni, and Jackeline Sanchez presents to us that there is a need for health provides to include peoples culture into their care and interventions to promote change. I found this article to be not only educational but intriguing. Before analyzing this article, I knew that there was a needed change in health care, thus, I was satisfied to read that there are researched strategies and ways to implement change.

Cultural competence is focused on learned behaviors and actions and can be pertain and individual, organization or policy (Oelke, Thurston, & Arthur, 2013). Ideally, a healthcare providers’ practice would only be influenced by the individual patient and/or the community of which the patient resides. But in reality, the healthcare providers’ practice and care is influenced by many entities, such as the

Cultural competency is especially important in the health care setting, where barriers to communication and access to quality care can result in delayed diagnosis, inappropriate treatment, or worse. Cultural competence involves both awareness and knowledge about other cultures. Cultural competence requires acknowledging that culture and ethnicity guide and affect behavior, and that all people are cultural beings (Betancourt et al.,2010). Many studies of cultural competence training have found that it has a beneficial effect on the attitudes, knowledge, and skills of physicians and on patient