Self-awareness: Health Care Worker Essay

Cultural competency aids in closing the “disparities gap” in health care. ("OMH," 2012, para. 2) In doing so, health professionals and their clients are better able to discuss concerns without cultural differences getting in the way of effective communication and problem solving. Being respectful of and sensitive to the client’s health beliefs, culture, values, and diverse needs can bring positive outcomes within treatment and patient care. After all, is it not the main job of the health care provider to ensure patient trust? Open forms of communication when dealing with client issues can only be provided if the patient is comfortable with his provider and believes his

“Cultural Awareness in The Human Services Multi-Ethnic Approach” proposes that as a minimum, a model for culturally responsive social and health services would require us to do the following: 1. Define a model of cross-cultural social work and caring services – the model has to be systematic and take into consideration cultural complexity and also ethnocentric features of the clients served. 2. Describe how the model is applicable to any cross-racial or cross-ethnic relationships. 3.

Rawlinson, (1990) defines self-awareness as a conscious process in which we consider our understanding of ourselves. Having self-awareness and the ability to reflect means you can assess your own knowledge, skills and behaviours (NCL, 2014). In order to improve the quality of care and develop skills and confidence, one must reflect on their self-awareness experiences, to reach their full potential of practise. To define reflection Duffy (2008) describes reflective practise as an active and deliberate process to critically examine practice. Through self-awareness individuals can get to know more about what they do and what limits their abilities (Ghaye and Lillyman, 2001). Thus improving the quality of care provided to service users, as nurses have the responsible for providing care to the best of their ability to patients and their families.

The United States is a country that is the home to many people who are from various cultures, races and religion. Differences in people can cause misunderstanding and conflicts. It therefore becomes clear why all healthcare professionals should become culturally competent by having awareness, knowledge and skills for their patient whose beliefs and values are different. If health care professions are not culturally competent, then they will fail their patients in numerous ways. The book titled The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman portray how healthcare professionals lack cultural competency when working with the Lee family.

The Vietnam War was a long and expensive war that dealt with North Vietnam and South Vietnam clashing out and seeing who comes out victorious; this war took place near a small little country near Southeast Asia. The 4 countries that bordered Vietnam are China, South Korea, Japan, and Indonesia. This country is only 7,000 miles away from Rahway and if you were to take a flight there it would take 20hrs.

In order to deliver nursing care to different cultures, nurses are expected to understand and provide culturally competent health care to diverse individuals. Culturally competent care is tailored to the specific needs of each client, while incorporating the individual’s beliefs and values (Stanhope & Lancaster, 2006, p. 90). By being culturally competent, nurses are able to help improve health outcomes by using cultural knowledge and specific skills in selecting interventions that are specific to each client (Stanhope & Lancaster). Therefore, nurses “should perform a cultural assessment on every client with whom they interact with” (Stanhope &

Cultural competency is the capacity of people or services to include ethnic/cultural considerations into all aspects of their work related to health promotion, disease prevention and other and other healthcare interventions (Cultural competence is important for several reasons, (Purnell, 2008a).First, it can contribute in the development of culturally sensitive practices which can reduce barriers that effect treatment in healthcare settings. Second, it can promote understanding, which is detrimental in cultural competence assessment, to know whom, the individuals known as the primary care provider and whom they view as the primary healer, can attribute to the promotion of trust and increase the person’s interest in participating

Working as a therapist can be exhausting, but yet, rewarding at the same time. As a therapist we deal with daily encounters of other people’s lives, issues, problems etc. Taking multiple cases of providing therapeutic interventions has an effect on the human body and the psyche. The wear and tear over time begins to haunt us without recognizing how neglectful we can be towards ourselves because our focus is for the sake of other people’s sanity. The profession is hard, and can be detrimental to professionals who do not take care of themselves. Self-care is an important aspect when working as a therapist. Our health, mental health, spiritual values, etc. should matter just as the client’s health, mental health and spiritual values matters

Cultural responsiveness is an ever-present challenge faced by professionals in our field. Due to the opportunities and freedoms our nation offers, the influx of diverse individuals and accompanying challenges will only increase. Culture is a lens through which we each filter our personal experiences. Because each of us possess our own implicit biases, it is critical that as clinicians we routinely conduct self-assessments in order increase our awareness of them. Throughout my practice and clinical training I have continually conducted personal needs assessments to target potential areas for personal growth. I believe that my efforts to do so have furthered my mission to provide culturally sensitive services.

A self-assessment through self-awareness is key for one to understand his own strengths and weaknesses. Only after conducting it, can he settle goals and objectives in order to take any corrective action. This is

Self care is essential to the nursing profession because it is a reflection on the quality of health care nurses provide to their patients, it portrays an image to the patients on what’s necessary towards healthy living and can help nurses battle with stress and personal health. Self care can be expressed as taking care of ones self’s health and overall wellbeing. This can be shown through eating healthy, exercising daily, getting enough sleep and completing weekly activities to reduce stress. Improving your overall health can benefit nurses from overworking themselves and help minimize the affects certain stressors can have on them. By doing so, the overall atmosphere in the workplace and the quality of healthcare provided to the patients will be greatly improved.

Self-awareness is a critical skill to hone as a behavioral health worker. Understanding how individual traits, cultural influences, and life experience shape perspective and constantly assessing one's thought processes in order to remain as objective as possible can be difficult but is necessary from an ethical standpoint. A lot of harm can be done if personal bias goes unchecked, intentional or not. This paper will define cultural bias and discusses my personal background, cultural identity, and biases and how they may influence my work.

First of all, I recognized that I was dealing with humans, and not just dealing with a disease process and application of the nursing process in the aspect of restoring patient health. I was dealing with emotions, and families, and cultural beliefs that influenced individual’s aspects of care. I started to see that health did not just incorporate healing the disease, but also recognized the importance of making sure patient’s felt that their

Self-awareness is a terminology that has been widely discussed in not only psychological but also business and managerial perspectives. There are a number of authors trying to propose different definitions of it.

Self-awareness practice theoretically takes an individual beyond his or her present context; by reflecting on their performance they gain a greater influence towards the nature of present experience. Self-analysis is very emancipatory because it contributes to the development of person knowledge (dekeyster et al, 2008). Self-awareness has three components that stand useful for an effective manager which are