Diversity And Cultural Competency For Health Care

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.

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).

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.

Campinha- Bacote and colleagues describes the components for cultural competence in healthcare. These includes cultural ; a) knowledge, b) awareness, c) skills, d) encounter and e) desire. Cultural awareness refers to self-examination as well as in-depth exploration of an individual cultural as well as professional background. I am able to explore my own cultural healthcare values and beliefs. This is because understanding another person's does not guarantee that one will become cultural competent. I am now able to use the cultural awareness assessment to assess my personal level of cultural awareness, and to get an insight on the understanding of my cultural values and beliefs

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 Competence Cultural competence has big impact on today’s society. Health care institutions need to be able to provide proper care to every patient. Cultural competence is about learning about different ethnic backgrounds. Everyone feels the need get social support in a health environment, especially here in the U.S.

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.

Being culturally competent and delivering culturally sensitive care is imperative for anyone in the medical profession. It is important because of the many diversities faced every day in the health care field. However, simply understanding the fact that there are so many health disparities is not enough. In order to reach out and effectively care for patients of different backgrounds and cultures one must understand the importance of cultural competency. In order to be culturally competent, a nurse must have knowledge of the different cultures, and

As the United States population continues to follow the trend of increasing diversity, the need for more culturally competent healthcare professionals increases as well. According to some of the leading experts in health care policy, cultural competency in health care can be described as the ability of systems and/or healthcare professionals to provide care to patients with diverse values, beliefs, and behaviors, including tailoring delivery to meet patients’ social, cultural, and linguistic needs (Betancourt, J.R., Green, A.R., & Carrillo, J.E., 2002). These researchers assert that there are essentially three specific barriers to cultural competency in the health care setting: lack of diversity in health care’s leadership and workforce, poorly designed systems of care that fall short of meeting the needs of diverse patient populations, and poor communication between providers

What is cultural competence? When reading our book and looking at scholarly articles for me to sum up what I think cultural competence is, I found myself rereading each definition over and over. To me cultural competence is understanding that each person is unique and their care should be as well. Truong, Paradies, & Priest (2014) state “cultural competency is a broad concept used to describe a variety of interventions that aim to improve the accessibility and effectiveness of health care services for people from racial/ethnic minorities”. It is important for a healthcare worker to not stereotype a person based on their appearance or race. Not all people that appear alike believe in the same things. In their article Patient-centered care:

Before one can discuss the importance of cultural competency, we must first understand what it is. But is culture? Furthermore, what is competence? To answer the first question - culture is, “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; also: the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time” (Merriam-Webster dictionary). With that understanding, what is competence? Also, according to the same source, competence is “a sufficiency of means for the necessities and conveniences of life. Now that we have broken down these two words, I will be utilizing them together to introduce the importance and downfalls of its effects on the world's (more specifically America’s) healthcare system.

According to research of health care organizations that all employees are required to attend diversity training. Cultural diversity seems to cross ethical guidance and challenges with relationships in health care. Many concerns that are connected with the following areas of the elderly, hospital and mental care. There are fundamentals of ethical values that are analyzed with the context of health care services and cultural competencies. The fundamentals of health care is: health care organizations who has encountered issues of dissatisfaction, and mistrust of health care services due to cultural competency. The addressing of these problems will help health professionals in the rebuilding of confidence and security of patients and patient care. Health care professionals are searching for new and improved patient- based approaches that will help decrease the level of cultural- diversity and health care services. Cultural

Cultural competency has increasingly been recognized as an important part of healthcare. Cultural competency is more than being ‘politically correct.’ It is an important part of ensuring that care is effective. Healthcare advice cannot be disseminated in a cookie-cutter fashion but rather must be conveyed in a way so that patients understand care instructions and genuinely understand the need to fulfill them. With this in mind, diversity awareness and education must be integrated into the education of all healthcare professionals from bottomof their careers. “A consistent body of research indicates a lack of culturally competent care directly contributes to poor patient outcomes, reduced patient compliance, and increased health disparities,

Having a foundation for being both culturally diverse and culturally aware as a provider of the healthcare team is critical. Cultural education should begin as the nursing student and continue through the life of the career. Adaptation of cultural competency proves positive patient outcomes during the entire nursing process. According to Galanti, (2008) “The path to cultural competence involves learning about, understanding and respecting the values and beliefs of others, and being able to apply the knowledge to provide better care for patients of diverse ethnic backgrounds” (p. ix).

For health care workers, cultural competency is important for obvious reasons. On a daily basis, healthcare professionals work with patients of a variety of cultures, and many work with team members who come from different cultures than their own. Medical and other healthcare professionals spend many years in school learning how and when to treat patients for giving symptoms, but teaching them to interact with patients currently falls on knowing the things that make up a person’s cultural identity. Cultural differences that exist between people, such as language, dress and traditions, and the way societies organize themselves, their conception of morality and religion, attitudes about illness and death and the way they interact with the environment. Cultural competence is important in health care because the patient outcome, patient readmissions, staff retention, and labor relations all determine the outcome of an organizations success. Diversity improves the effectiveness and productivity of the workforce. Disadvantages of ignoring cultural diversity can result in a loss of revenue for the business. Company growth will also be affected by ignoring cultural diversity. Steps an organization should take to face this challenge is to implement training that cover workforce diversities and keep an open dialogue among employees expressing concerns, differences, ideas, etc.