Gender and Culture in Healthcare Access

Gender and Culture in Healthcare Access

• Gender and culture are societal constructs impacting healthcare access and utilization.

Unit Overview

• Social determinants of health play a significant role.
• Healthcare is considered a human/political right.
• Socio-economic status influences healthcare access.
• Class discussions and group debates will be part of the course.

Learning Outcomes

• This unit aims to help students understand how different groups experience, understand, and respond to health, well-being, and illness in communities and societies.
• Critical factors like education, social class, gender, ethnicity, and culture influence access to supportive resources for health and well-being.

Assessment Criteria

• Competency is determined through identifying and discussing the relationships between health, illness, and culture, societal structures and institutions.
• Competency requires a discussion of South Africa's current healthcare system, foot healthcare as a human right, and cultural factors determining health experiences in South Africa and elsewhere.
• Assess the delivery of foot healthcare in RSA according to proposed policy and discuss why foot health outcomes differ across social and cultural contexts.

Introduction to Culture

• Culture encompasses spiritual, material, and intellectual features characterizing a society or social group.
• It includes arts, letters, modes of life, human rights, value systems, traditions, and beliefs.
• Culture dictates gender roles.
• Cultural values, beliefs, and practices can promote gender inequality within patriarchal societies.
• While pockets of matrilineal culture may exist, society is mainly patrilineal.

Gender Identity and Expression

• Gender Identity: An individual's sense of their gender (female/male/other).
• Sexual Orientation: Attraction to others (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, etc.).
• Gender Expression: How one physically communicates their gender identity (feminine, masculine).
• Biological Sex: Assigned at birth based on genitalia and other factors (female, male, intersex).
• Social constructs of gender involve roles, responsibilities, behaviors, and expectations.

The Difference Between Sex and Gender

• Sex: Biologically determined differences involving genetic susceptibility, resistance, and immunity.
• Gender: Socially constructed differences with roles, responsibilities, behaviors, and expectations.
• Lower status for women can result in increased needs and vulnerabilities.
• Sex is a biological characteristic while Gender is a social construct.
• Gender interacts with but is different from sex.
• 'Intersex' is an umbrella term for variations in biological characteristics.

Distinguishing Key Terms

• Gender identity is an innate, internal experience of gender which may or may not correspond to physiology.
• Gender expression is how one expresses gender identity.
• Gender expression is not indicative of gender identity.
• Transgender is used for people whose gender identity and expression doesn't align with norms.
• Sexual orientation is a person's attraction towards others.
• Sexual orientation cannot be assumed based on assigned sex, gender identity, or gender expression.

Intersectionality

• Intersectionality explains how gender power dynamics interact with hierarchies of privilege/disadvantage.
• Factors include sex, gender, race, ethnicity, age, class, socioeconomic status, religion, language, geographical location, disability, migration status, identity, and sexual orientation.
• Indigenous women have worse maternal health outcomes in Latin America and the Carribean.
• Inequities in maternal health between ethnic groups should identify health system and community factors.
• Monitoring health inequities is essential for designing better programs to reduce health risks among Indigenous women.

Understanding Gender

• Gender produces inequalities intersecting with social and economic inequalities.
• Gender-based discrimination intersects with ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, age, location, identity, and sexual orientation.
• Gender inequality includes restrictions on mobility, reduced decision-making power, lower literacy rates, discriminatory attitudes, and lack of training about health needs of women and girls.
• Gender and sex are related but different from gender identity.
• Healthcare organization impacts access to information, support, services, and outcomes.
• Healthcare should be affordable, accessible, and acceptable, provided with quality, equity, and dignity.

Culture Defined

• Culture is a universal phenomenon with diverse norms of behavior, and awareness of interdependence.
• Culture includes thoughts, communications, actions, customs, beliefs, values, and institutions.
• The term culture includes the ways in which people with disabilities, people from religious background, or people who are gay, lesbian, or transgender, experience the world around them.

Cultural Competence

• Cultural competence involves responding respectfully and effectively to all cultures, languages, classes, races, ethnic backgrounds, religions, spiritual traditions, immigration status, and diversity factors.
• It is set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together amongst professionals.
• Cultural competence is integrating knowledge about individuals and groups into standards and attitudes to improve services.
• Competence in cross-cultural functioning requires learning new behavior patterns.