Reflection on Health Care Workers

Cultural competence is a group of similar manners, attitudes, and strategies that collaborate in a system, organization or among experts and facilitate that system, organization or those professions to perform efficiently in cross-cultural states. A culturally competent health and wellness program provides services that take action to past inequities, existed realities, varied values, behaviors, and beliefs. It adapts advances to gather the diverse requirements of multicultural populations. Cultural competency can be implemented into our health and wellness programs by training the staff and health care experts of the programs to understand a patient’s diverse values, behaviors, beliefs, and modify treatment to meet the patients' community,

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

In this great nation we live in today that has been vastly increasing diversity bring so many great opportunities. But with these great opportunities there are also challenges that are continually looked over constantly. One of the challenges is our health care system that fails to deliver culturally competent services. Cultural competency helps to enable providers to deliver services that are respectful to diverse patients. This helps with patients own health beliefs, practices and cultural and linguistic needs. This is why this training is needed in every health facility. Many doctors go through this problem not understanding their patient’s needs. If I were a doctor I would use this skill. Certain racial and ethnic minorities receive poorer

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the key issues and benefits to enhancing ethnic diversity and cultural competency in the workforce, as a means to addressing the burgeoning healthcare disparities in the ethnic-minority groups within our community.

I have learned that it is important that educators  and health providers be trained on cultural competency to understand the population they are serving. Marks, Sims, and Osher (King, Sims, & Osher, n.d.) define cultural competency  as a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or among professionals and enables that system, agency, or those professionals to work effectively in cross–cultural situations" ( as cited in Cross et al., 1989; Isaacs & Benjamin, 1991). Health providers and educators should investigate demographic patterns or trends in the place where they live and work. This brings awareness of the types of cultures that they might come across when they are working with people. Organizations should integrate and implement policies that promote the value of  diversity, self-assessment, manage the dynamics of difference, acquire and institutionalize cultural knowledge, and adapt to diversity and the cultural contexts of communities they serve (Georgetown  University, 2004). Georgetown University (2004) also stresses that culture competency grows gradually and is always open for improvement.

We live in a very diverse nation and overcoming challenges related to cultural beliefs and preferences is a very common obstacle for health care workers today. In an article in The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing cultural diversity is defined as being more than just race,

Cultural competency not only encompasses race or ethnicity, but a quality of care for all individuals. Studies illustrate that cultural competency is currently lacking in the health care field; this results in the disparities that exist among the minority population with low

The human resources department is an essential aspect to any healthcare organization. In order to reduce these disparities HR departments and their organizations recruit, train and educate a more diverse workforce (Fried, & Fottler, 2011, pg. 301). These diverse workforce employees will continue to be the new norm as the population increases. One of the main objectives of the human resource department is to make their employees culturally aware and provide them with the cultural intelligence that it takes to furnish their patients with the best quality

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.

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

Cultural competence can be defined as using the ability of one’s awareness, attitude, knowledge and skill to effectively interact with a patient’s many cultural differences. Madeline Leininger, a pioneer on transcultural nursing describes it this way; “a formal area of study and practice focused on comparative human-care differences and similarities of the beliefs, values and patterned lifeways of cultures to provide culturally congruent, meaningful, and beneficial health care to people” (Barker, 2009, p. 498). The importance of cultural diversity in healthcare allows for the delivery of appropriate cultural autonomy. Showing respect for others will lead to trust between nurse and

Cultural competency seeks to promote patient care by understanding that each patient has “diverse values, beliefs, and behaviors” (“Health Research”, 2013, p.3). With that understanding, the delivery of health care is tailored to meet each “patient’s social, cultural, and linguistic needs” (Health Research, 2013, p. 3). The National Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS) Standards in Health and Health Care can assist with implementation (Health Research, 2013). Hospital should collect and analyze demographic data to determine their patient population and the specific needs of that population (Health Research, 2013). The hospital should engage with the community through communicating the findings from surveys and then education staff based on findings. The feedback from the community uncovers important information that can be used to train and educate staff on cultural competence. This is important as staff interacts with patients each

For a successful profession, cultural competence should be put into consideration to create an environment that favors better communication. Since migration of people across the globe has increased, it has resulted to a population that is ethnically diverse. Nurses must therefore interact with a diversified community, hence the need to learn about their culture. When involved in a work team, the following disciplines should be considered: valuing diversity, having the ability to asses and scrutinize culture, to be aware of differences that emerge when different culture interact, ability to adapt the means of service delivery with culture diversity in mind, as well as institutionalizing the knowledge of

Healthcare, ever changing, has advanced to an era of progression in which it is becoming more and more common for radical change in all varieties of aspects of the process within which the health care system runs to occur. For many of us, there is the ever so present idea that constant change is necessary not only to stay competitive in regards to any other competitors in the same field of service, but also to also provide groundbreaking and innovative equalized opportunities and treatment of all. As modern day society becomes increasingly aware and active on the topic of equality, it is important for health care providers to remember that it is essential for there to be diversity within the culture imbedded in healthcare delivery systems. Many of the reasons that make the issue of culture a topic worth mentioning include, but are not limited to, the potential positive and/or negative impacts culture and diversity can have on the healthcare delivery system, the importance in staying up to date and staying competitive with other healthcare systems, and the internal factors that have a hold in the change of culture and whether or not it can be successfully maintained within the health care organization. As stated by B.E. Smith’s article Leadership Diversity: The Path to Value-Based Care, “Increasing the racial, ethnic, gender and generational diversity of health care leadership is essential for the provision of culturally competent,

Have you ever been to the doctor and don't quite understand what the provider is telling you, or are you a healthcare worker and you don't understand your patients? Should the healthcare provider get diversity training or should they maybe learn new languages? More than ever before, healthcare professionals are subjected to dealing with a number of immense and different cultural diversities. While diversity is often a term used to refer specifically to cultural differences, diversity applies to all the qualities that make people different. Diversity requires more than knowing about individual differences and it key for overcoming cross-cultural barriers in healthcare.