Cultural Sensitivity In Healthcare

Both articles express how important it is to be culturally self-aware and in touch with your personal beliefs, views, and morals. If you aren’t aware of what your cultural beliefs are you won’t be able to provide you patients with the cultural care and respect that they require in their recovery to become healthy again. In addition, the two articles (Newson 2009, Byrson 2012) both talk about how important it is to be open minded with people who may have a different opinions and views on certain things. If you aren’t open to treating you patients in the cultural way that they want to be treated, your patient will feel disrespected and unimportant. Therefore, their health will suffer because of your incompetence to accommodate their cultural needs. A nurse needs to be culturally self-aware, they need to know what their own personal views are first so they can understand that not everyone’s views will be the same. This means they need to be capable of being open and accepting to other people’s cultural wants and needs. By being these two things you will be able to provide people of all cultures with the respect and treatment they

It is important for policy makers to create services that are culturally sensitive since the United States is a culturally diverse country; moreover, Healthcare professionals needs to be culturally competent so that they can guide policy makers in making sustainable systems for individual communities. “Efforts to improve cultural competence among health care professionals and organizations would contribute to improving the quality of health care for all consumers” (GeorgeTown Health Policy Institutes, 2004, para 31). Language barrier is another culture issue that prevents the community from getting the care that they deserve. “Cultural and language differences and socioeconomic status interact with and contribute to low health literacy, defined as the inability to understand or act on medical/therapeutic instructions” (Shaw, Huebner, Armin, Orzech, & Vivian, 2009, p.1). There should be health policy addressing this issue because of the confusion and inappropriate treatment that many

Adapting to different cultural beliefs and practices requires flexibility and a respect for others view points. Cultural competence means to really listen to the patient, to find out and learn about the patient's beliefs of health and illness. To provide culturally appropriate care we need to know and to understand culturally influenced health behaviors. However, becoming culturally competent is a much more daunting task. Culture (and ethnicity) often influences a patient’s perceptions of health and illness. Therefore, if healthcare providers appear insensitive to cultural diversity, their actions may negatively affect the quality of the healthcare that they provide.

Certainly there are a lot of cultural and ethical barriers affecting people behavior in taking their medication. As for Matthew, being an American Indian male has already been exposed to their traditional remedy. So having that in mind I will think that the provider needs to be cultural sensitive and try to work with him. The use of appropriate techniques

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.

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).

Cultural Competency can be described as one’s ability to learn about cultures other than their own. It speaks to the value one places on diversity and their desire to foster an open exchange of ideas between dissimilar cultures. While in a perfect world, cultural competency would be of heightened importance in all aspects of life, there are certain industries where cultural competency factor more heavily; one of those being health care. This is especially true in areas with increased diversities of cultures, ethnic groups and a variety of languages.

After watching the Cultural Competence in Health care video, I learned that there are many different people I will deal with in my career as an advocate for health. One quote I really liked from the video stated, “My diversity is my strength, not my weakness”. I believe this is true because having so many different people of different cultural backgrounds opens up the opportunity for different points of view to develop new ideas. This reminds me of the activity we did in class on our first day. We were asked to simply write down what our thoughts were. What we realized upon getting our sheets back is that when you work with others, they may have an idea you had not thought about. Overall, I think this video is a good representation of the

The United States Census Bureau has predicted that the minorities will become the majority by 2042. Unfortunately, the minorities collectively live below poverty level and are uninsured for healthcare, even though there have been many attempts to improve as mentioned in the above post. Some studies have also proved that the minorities have a tendency to live a shorter life, which in turn means that they have a higher percentage of loss of life, and have little knowledge about health care and available resources.

Elaborate on how you exhibit cultural sensitivity when communicating with patients, families, and healthcare team members. Culture includes many aspects of an individual and can comprise of language, ethnicity, race gender, faith, sexual orientation, profession, tastes, age, socioeconomic status, or disability.

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.

Cultural Competency, widely known as the ability to understand the differences between cultures and how one can assess and effectively respond to each patient’s cultural diversity. Cultural competency is something that can be applied far and wide to many different professions, but its importance is strongly present in the healthcare industry.

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 sensitivity means being aware that cultural differences and similarities exist and have an effect on values, learning, action, and behavior (Stanhope, et al., 2005). Beliefs and practices about health and illness are different with different cultures. With appropriate respect and interaction, nurses can