Professional care on transcultural

sensitivities and population diversity

Learning Outcomes:

1. Describe factors associated with cultural sensitivity within

healthcare.
2. Discuss the influence of culture on health and healthcare decisions.
3. Identify approaches for dealing with transcultural issues in
healthcare.
Factors associated with cultural sensitivity within healthcare

1. Understanding culture
2. Cultural values and beliefs
Understanding Culture
● Culture can be defined as the “personal identification, language, thoughts,
communications, actions, customs, beliefs, values, and institutions that are
often specific to ethnic, racial, religious, geographic, or social groups.”
● Culture is also defined as “. . .the sum total of the ideas, beliefs, customs,
values, knowledge, and material artefacts that are handed down from one
generation to the next in a society”
● An individual’s cultural affiliations can affect where and how they seek care,
how they describe symptoms, how they select treatment options, and
whether they follow care recommendations.
● Similarly, providers bring their own cultural orientations, including the
culture of medicine.
Understanding Culture
● Cultural diversity not only relates to a person’s country of birth, but also to
their ancestry, the country of birth of their parents, languages spoken,
Aboriginal descent, religious affiliation, ideas, belief systems, customs and
social behaviour.
● Cultural diversity can create many challenges in the provision of healthcare.
● Global population and socioeconomic changes have resulted in an increased
number of hospitalised patients from diverse backgrounds.
● Healthcare provider must be cognisant of patients’ individual healthcare
preferences that are influenced by cultural diversity, and the importance of
communication to ensuring safety and equity in the provision of healthcare.
Influence of culture on health and healthcare decisions

1. Culture and the health care system

Influence of culture on health and healthcare decisions

● Culture plays a huge role in medical interactions.

● It influences how an individual might view an illness or treatment.
● Culture may also affect the decision-making process.
● Cultural beliefs can affect how a patient will seek care and from whom,
how he or she will manage self-care, how he will make health choices,
and how she might respond to a specific therapy.
● Cultural issues play a key role in compliance, which is a person’s
willingness to adhere to the doctor’s recommendations.
Influence of culture on health and healthcare decisions

● Culture influences healthcare at all levels, including communications and

interactions with doctors and nurses, health disparities, health care
outcomes, and even the illness experience itself.
● People in some cultures believe illness is the will of a higher power, and
may be more reluctant to receive health care.
● Culturally sensitive demonstrates understanding and respect for
individuals and promotes patient and family satisfaction.
Approaches for dealing with transcultural issues in healthcare

1. Cultural competence
2. Culturally sensitive
1. Cultural competence

Cultural competence in healthcare refers to the “ability of systems to provide care

to patients with diverse values, beliefs and behaviors, including the tailoring of
healthcare delivery to meet patients’ social, cultural and linguistic needs.”
Being a culturally competent health system requires behaviors, attitudes, and
policies that support effective interactions in cross-cultural situations.
The cultural competence movement has grown with the rise of national attention
to pervasive racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare.
1. Cultural competence

Disparities in healthcare extend to the patient safety arena.

Patient safety events that can result from the failure to address culture, language,
and health literacy include diagnostics errors, missed screenings, unexpected
negative responses to medication, harmful treatment interactions from
simultaneous use of traditional medicines, healthcare-associated infections,
adverse birth outcomes, inappropriate care transitions, and inadequate patient
adherence to provider recommendations and follow-up visits.
With growing diversity in patient populations across the country, the risk
increases that differences between patients and providers will contribute to
missed care opportunities and safety events
Elements of Cultural Competence
2. Culturally sensitive
● Culture sensitivity is defined as “. . .the ability to recognise, understand, and react
appropriately to behaviours of persons who belong to a cultural or ethnic group that differs
substantially from one’s own”.
● Cultural sensitivity is the knowledge, awareness, and acceptance of other cultures and
others' cultural identities.
● Cultural sensitivity requires an awareness of cultural diversity, including how culture may
influence patients’ values, beliefs and attitudes, and involves acknowledging and respecting
individual differences.
● When healthcare provider not culturally sensitive, patients and families are less likely to be
satisfied with their perceptions and experiences of care, there is an increased risk of
miscommunication, and cultural disparities may result; leading to poor adherence to
treatment, poorer health outcomes and an increased prevalence of adverse events.
Approaches to Improving Cultural Competence

● Cultural competence in health care is broadly defined as the ability of

providers and organizations to understand and integrate these factors into the
delivery and structure of the health care system.
● The goal of culturally competent health care services is to provide the
highest quality of care to every patient, regardless of race, ethnicity, cultural
background, proficiency or literacy.
Approaches to Improving Cultural Competence

1. Language assistance:
● A strategy to overcome language barriers, can take the form of bilingual clinicians
and staff and qualified foreign language interpreters.
● Otherwise providers might try to “get by” with the limited English skills of patients,
their own inadequate foreign language skills, or unqualified interpreters, such as
patients’ friends or family members or untrained staff.
● Examples of documented patient safety events due to a lack of timely language
assistance include performing an x-ray on the wrong part of the body, falls due to the
patient not knowing to ask for assistance, and inability to treat emergency room
patients due to failure to obtain medical history or medication list.
Approaches to Improving Cultural Competence

2. Active Listening:
● Actively listening to an individual allows you to learn about that person’s culture and
experiences.
● You should listen for total meaning by focusing on the content that is being given and
concentrating on what is being said.
● Active listening entails thinking about the feeling behind the content or the emotion
involved.
● Do not jump directly to giving people advice or offering solutions.
● The response that is effective requires seeking more information and multiple
perspectives first.
Approaches to Improving Cultural Competence

3. Empathy:
● Empathy is the art of seeing and feeling the situation of another, walking in another
person’s shoes, or seeing the world as that person sees it.
● Empathy involves understanding that person’s perceptions and the conclusions that
person draws about his or her life experiences.
● It does not mean you have to agree with that person’s perceptions and conclusions,
but at the very least, you are able to see the other person’s position.
● To be effective, you must engage in appropriate inquiry and dialog.
● It also involves building relationships with an individual or particular cultural group.
Approaches to Improving Cultural Competence

4. Engagement:
● Engagement should be mutually beneficial and a reciprocal learning experience in
which you learn from one another.
● Focus on the behaviors and the situation, not the person.
● If the focus of the conversation or interaction is about a tradition or belief, keep the
feedback within the context of that tradition or belief.
Approaches to Improving Cultural Competence

Some common strategies for improving the patient-provider interaction and

institutionalizing changes in the health care system include:
1. Provide interpreter services
2. Recruit and retain minority staff
3. Provide training to increase cultural awareness, knowledge, and skills
4. Coordinate with traditional healers
5. Use community health workers
6. Incorporate culture-specific attitudes and values into health promotion tools
7. Include family and community members in health care decision making
8. Locate clinics in geographic areas that are easily accessible for certain populations
9. Provide linguistic competency that extends beyond the clinical encounter to the
appointment desk, advice lines, medical billing, and other written materials
Ada soalan?