Cultural Health Care Needs - Essay Example

Cultural Health Care Needs Major ethnic and religious groups represented in Jersey I live in Jersey a diverse city with different cultures though Hispanics comprise the dominant ethnic compared to others (Miller & Valling, 2013). Most Hispanics, about 68% are Catholics while others comprise evangelical Protestants, which embrace mainstreams in the region (Miller & Valling, 2013). They possess the highest minority population in the state approximating 18% of the state’s population and it is the leading augmenting inhabitants. The Hispanic population hails from Cuba and Puerto Rico but the group eventually became more diverse with the Mexican and other South American nations after joining them (Miller & Valling, 2013). Others embrace Native Americans, Indians as well as Chinese who all have different religions (Miller & Valling, 2013). Resources available to meet social and health care needs of Hispanics Over the past years, the municipal council has worked and started a program called Community Health Improvement Program (CHIP) whose objective was to try and find the population’s health needs to improve where need be. There are clinics all round that receive funding from the federal community health center. These community clinics meet the urgent health care needs for the groups that lack insurance cover. There is also active emergency department in hospitals that provide after-hour care, private health facilities for work related injuries, maternal health clinics for pregnant mothers, and child health clinic and school clinics for child health care. There are schools within the state that are in place to help the Hispanics prosper through their education. Since most of these people are incapable of conversing in English, they can only learn in their Hispanic native. Some schools have embraced the Bilingual Education Act by having groups of students taught in either English or Spanish depending on their preference. The state has also established programs like “let’s talk” that encourage volunteers to teach Hispanics some English. This is to ensure they are capable of mingling and conversing with other with ease as well as access varied services administered by specialists who may not be knowing their language. The library facilities in the state have restructured its services such that the Hispanic population can be able to access libraries. REFORMA, which is an associate of American Library Association, has come up with services that can be suitable for the Hispanics like providing services to Hispanic community by having a bilingual and relevant collections in their libraries. They have also employed professionals of Hispanic decent so that they can effectively serve the Hispanic population (Roy, Jansen, & Meyers, 2009). Mechanisms in place to facilitate access to these services by these groups To facilitate educational services, the state government has had help by the parental governments of the Hispanics by allocating necessary resources to promote bilingual education in schools (Murillo et al. 2009). This move is to try to keep Hispanic children in schools since the core motive as to why they drop out of school is that they not conversant with the language. The government has created an act called Affordable Care Act that can enable everyone access health care according to someone’s affordability and access. This Act will assist the Hispanic population that has no insurance cover as well as those who had insurance but lacked appropriate cover and security (Pollock, 2014). This act has managed to give more families the control over their care by investing on wellness and prevention. The government has managed to employ bilingual personnel in its facilities. These people help the Hispanics who want to access services but cannot converse due to language barrier. With these people around, the Hispanics have had easy time to communicate and get help they needed. This has been helpful more so in hospitals and schools where they could not comprehend anything in English. The government has also launched Educational Excellence for Hispanics program meant to improve educational opportunities as well as expanding excellence in academics for them (Pollock, 2014). This initiative will prompt Hispanic children to attend school and eventually realize attainments in this sector because currently experienced the lowest education level overall (Pollock, 2014). Social and health care barriers that exist for this group The main barrier preventing the Hispanic population from accessing social and health facilities in the community is that they are not insured. Among the whole community population, the Hispanics are the most uninsured with some having Medicaid coverages and this forces most of them only to access the charity care. Because of this, most of them risk accessing medical care or much less quality medical care thus being vulnerable to complications like infectious and chronic maladies (Chesnay & Anderson, 2012). Some barriers are politically determined such that one cannot open up a rural clinic facility to help a population. This is because they cannot get funding from the federal governments since the laws states that the ratio of doctor to patient must be accurate and met. These places have a few teams of full time practitioners, hence there is no good number of doctors to serve the patient load (Chesnay & Anderson, 2012). Most Latinos are unable to converse in English fluently; hence, language setback has augmented the challenge of accessing medical care. They have also had difficulty in following prescription since the medicines have instructions in English as well as practitioner’s directives (Chesnay & Anderson, 2012). Devoid of English knowledge has also prevented most Hispanic children from attending educational services and some have dropped out because they cannot understand English. Either most Hispanics lack income or they are low-income people. Due to this, they cannot access some facilities like health care and school for they do not have enough to not only care for their health issues but also sustain themselves. For low-income Hispanics, they cannot afford the costs of care in quality facilities despite insured. Most Hispanics were born outside the U.S (Chesnay & Anderson, 2012). while others are recent immigrants who have cultural beliefs towards health care. This affects their access to such facilities for they have negative mentality towards them; hence, majority lack a reliable healthcare centers (Chesnay & Anderson, 2012). References Chesnay. M., & Anderson, B. (2012). “Caring for the vulnerable: Perspectives in nursing theory, practice, and research.” Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning. Miller, W. & Walling, J. (2013). “The political battle over congressional redistricting.” Lanham : Lexington Books. Murillo, E., Villenas, S., Galván, R., Muñoz, J., Martínez, C., & Machado-Casas, M. (2009). “Handbook of Latinos and Education: Theory, Research, and Practice.” Routledge. Pollock, J. (2014). “Media and Social Inequality: Innovations in Community Structure Research.” Routledge. Roy, L., Jensen, K. & Meyers, A. (2009). “Service learning: Linking library education and practice.” Chicago: American Library Association. Read More