Cultural Competency in Healthcare

Cultural Competency in Healthcare

• Cultural competency requires healthcare providers to be sensitive, appropriate, and competent to meet patient and family needs.
• Inquire about cultural norms and preferences before removing family members; otherwise, care is culturally incongruent.
• Cultural Proficiency: Maintaining and gaining cultural knowledge, sharing it with others.
• Cultural Awareness: Self-examining personal biases towards other cultures.
• Cultural Knowledge: Healthcare professionals actively seeking and gaining knowledge about diverse cultural groups.
• Cultural Humility: Recognizing personal limitations in understanding another culture and perspective.
• Cultural Skill: The ability to conduct a multifaceted cultural assessment.
• Cultural Sensitivity: Valuing, admiring, and respecting cultures different from one's own.

Linguistic Competence

• Provide free language resources and facilitate timely access to all healthcare services.
• Inform all individuals about the availability of language assistance.
• Ensure competence of individuals providing language assistance (avoid untrained individuals unless waivered).
• Offer accessible print and multimedia materials, and signage, in patients' preferred languages.

Acculturation and Assimilation

• Acculturation: A process where individuals or groups transition from one culture and adopt traits of another.
• Assimilation: A process where an individual adapts to the host culture's values, abandoning their original cultural preferences.

Culture Defined

• Culture encompasses integrated patterns of human behaviour within racial, ethnic, religious, or social groups.
• Components of culture include language, communication styles, beliefs, values, thoughts, actions, and institutions.

Culturally Congruent Care

• Culturally congruent care aligns with a person's values, life patterns, and meanings.
• It involves providing care based on an individual's cultural beliefs, practices, and values.
• Effective communication is crucial. Providers cannot have complete cultural knowledge.

Social Determinants of Health

• Social determinants of health are conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age.
• Examples include age, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, access to nutritious food, transportation resources, religion, sexual orientation, level of education, education access and quality, health care access and quality, neighborhood and built environment, social and community context, and economic stability.
• These factors can create health disparities, particularly for marginalized groups.

Health Disparity

• Health disparity is a preventable difference in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health that is experienced by socially and economically disadvantaged populations.
• Health disparities reflect differences in health status, disease risk factors, health outcomes, and limited access to healthcare.

Marginalized Groups

• Marginalized groups (e.g., people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, people with mental health challenges, individuals with lower educational attainment) are more likely to experience poor health outcomes and earlier mortality due to systemic issues.

Health Literacy

• Health literacy is the understanding and use of health information. Healthcare providers should use appropriate language the patient understands.

Intersectionality

• Intersectionality is a policy model describing factors and power structures shaping and influencing life.

Oppression

• Oppression is a formal and informal system of advantages and disadvantages tied to social group membership. Societal norms, biases, interactions, and beliefs reinforce this system.

Racial Identity

• Racial identity is based on self-identification with one or more social groups sharing a common heritage.

Unconscious/Implicit Bias

• Unconscious/implicit bias involves unawareness of personal biases related to background, cultural environment, and experiences.

Stereotype

• A stereotype is an assumed belief about a particular group.

Critical Thinking in Nursing Practice

• Critical thinking in nursing practice involves questioning, seeking, and examining information to arrive at deeper understanding and solutions, particularly in relation to patients.

Clinical Decision Making

• Clinical decision making is a problem-solving approach nurses use to identify patient needs and select appropriate treatment.

Clinical Judgment

• Clinical judgment is a conclusion about a patient's needs or health problems.