Cultural Competency in Health Care - Essay Example

"Cultural Competency in Health Care" is a worthy example of a paper on the health system.
An individual’s income is a major factor in how they perceive and prioritize their health. Any person ought to adopt a healthy lifestyle and practice recommended plans to maintain or improve their health. People with higher income tend to be healthier and live longer compared to lower-income earners. This is because they can easily afford better housing, more food varieties, and also have access to better health care facilities. High income enables people to seek frequent health tests and check-ups thus more advice on healthy living. High-income earners also enjoy easier access to physical exercise facilities (Achrekar, Murthy, et al., 2016).  Health care providers must clearly understand their patient’s income and budget. By so doing, the healthcare provider will determine what health care services to offer to their patients within their budget and also what advice to give. The provider can also use insurance adopted by their client to cater for better services.

Client: Ms. Brown, 34 yrs. & Native American

Care plan by R, Malcolm, RN

Date initiated: 17,07,2020

NURSING DIAGNOSIS

GOAL &OUTCOMES

INTERVENTIONS

EVALUATION

Difficulty in breathing

Chest pains

Dry cough

The patient will undergo lung screening.

The patient will try different positions while breathing.

Assess breathing patterns regarding rhythm, depth, and rate.

Assess  position presumed comfortable for easy breathing

The patient frequently changed to different positions to ease breathing.

Pains reduced, but the client tired faster.

Cultural awareness refers to the understanding of cultural differences among people of different cultural decent, values, their varying beliefs, practices, and views. Cultural sensitivity is the state of being aware and accepting people's varying values and beliefs without attaching a judgment to their actions based on your beliefs. Cultural relevancy is correctly using varying cultural practices to deal with or interact with people of different cultural backgrounds.  Cultural competence is a person’s ability to effectively interact with other people from various cultural backgrounds while being fully aware of their cultural background (Garneau, Pepin, 2015). This goes forward to one learning other cultural practices to fit in in the different cultures. Cultural humility is the ability to maintain a good relationship with people from different cultures while upholding their varying beliefs and maintaining an inter-personal attitude that focuses more on other cultures than that of the particular individual(Hollins,2015)

In any health sector, cultural sensitivity would be of more concern to a practitioner. This entails keeping at heart the patient’s particular beliefs, values, and practices while maintaining health regulations and practices.   While being culturally sensitive to a patient’s culture, competence will be valuable to maintain medical ethics. Cultural awareness helps understand what practices to value more and which to discourage a patient from. Cultural humility will help value a patient’s view more than that of the practitioner, while relevancy maintains the usefulness of the particular practice across various cultural backgrounds (Williams, Brown, 2015).

Culture is people’s way of life. The way of life is determined by their values, beliefs, practices, and social behavior. Culture has been described as the software of the mind of the people of a particular culture. This analogy is because any person acts within a certain predetermined set of rules that are laid out by cultural values and practices.  For any software to operate there has to be programs set to run the operations; similarly, for any society to exist there has to be a set of rules drawn up to regulate the behavior of each member (Betancourt, Corbett &Bondaryk, 2014). These rules then can be framed as the software of the community. Any belief or practice adopted by a particular society directly affects and determines the actions of each member of society. 

As a healthcare worker, it is of great importance to withhold medical values above misleading cultural practices that could inhibit proper administration of care to patients. This can be achieved by discussing the principles of medical practice with a patient so as to bring consensus and understanding without compromising standards or patients' understanding while being fully culturally sensitive to their reactions.

This course “culture with cultural competence” has been a very enlightening course in my studies. The course's focus on various definitions helps different meanings of the terms. It also brings insight into real practice as a health worker. Integration of knowledge into actual practitioners’ world is crucial in expressing a full understanding of classwork and is helping broaden knowledge on how to perform in the actual world.

As a learner, I expect to gain more insight into the course through more classwork lessons and assigning of more research work to help practice skills gained and integrate class and actual environments as a practitioner.