Emerging Standards of Care: Culturally Competent Healthcare - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages... This is the picture of the modern world and is a challenge to emerge new standards of nursing care to allocate the changes the society made. Today we live in society of multicultural state, where every community is comprised of people with differences such as language. The context of this essay will go around diversity in the viewpoint of health care. Cultural competency is somewhat a part of transcultural nursing that enables nurses to work with people of different cultures. Cultural competency is now widely utilized to bridge the gap of cultural differences among communities such as language differences and other barriers to be able to bring unbiased health care regardless of culture. Key words: culture, cultural competency, multicultural society, barriers Emerging Standards of Care: Culturally Competent Healthcare In a vast multi cultural society people are in, the need for cultural respect and sensitivity is an important aspect to better understand each other and avoid miscommunication. The nurse healthcare system is a definite example of a diverse multi-cultural set up involving vast array of people especially now that the nursing has become a worldwide phenomenon in being globally and culturally competitive in serving clients of different races, ethnicities and cultures. In this aspect the importance of culturally competent nursing care comes into place where the barriers of culture and language is being crossed over to meet the demands of giving the ideal health care to all clients regardless of their cultural differences. Almost everywhere in the world societies are no longer composed of a single culture. In a hospital setting a nurse can attest that not even once in their hospital career that they have not encountered a client of a different culture— how are nurses going to properly assess a Chinese for an example who does not how to speak English at all, or knowing how patriotic Japanese people are that seldom of them knows how to speak other languages so how are nurses going to deal with the language barrier to know what is actually wrong, or how would a nurse care for a Muslim client in a sectarian facility that they would never feel their differences or given otherwise a catholic nurse working in a Muslim land. All these ideas would have gone so difficult for nurses to deal with until the concept of culturally competent care. The make-up of the current world population is changing as a result of immigration patterns and significant increases among racially, ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse populations. Health care organizations and programs, and state and local governments must implement systemic change in order to meet the health needs of today’s diverse population (National Center for Cultural Competence, 2012). Cultural Competency: What it means Cultural competency has been defined by many health care practitioners all over the world over the years but the context of what it really means lies on the same understanding. One definition defines cultural competence as a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or among professionals and enable effective work in cross-cultural situations (Anderson et al., 2003, p. 68). The key to understanding cultural competency lies on the basis of giving people with health service while understanding and respecting a person’s culture and not compromising them along the process. Cultural competence embraces the principles of equal access and non-discriminatory practices in service delivery (NCCC, 2012). Culture refers to integrated patterns of human behavior that include the language, thoughts, communications, actions, customs, beliefs, values, ...Download file to see next pagesRead More