Question

This paper is about cultural competence. You will first examine how you feel about different cultures and if you feel they are treated fairly in the healthcare setting. You will pick an ethnic group and give a brief background on their cultural beliefs. The last part is about how that culture handles mental illness. Each culture has different ideas about the causes of mental illness and their acceptance of the illness. Some cultures believe it is caused by evil spirits or curses from other people. They may want to replace conventional treatment with or use in conjunction, with alternative treatments. Such therapies include treatment by herbalists, folk healers, invocations of the good spirits, imagery, religious ceremonies etc. The paper should be at least 3 pages plus a cover sheet and references in proper APA format. If you need help with APA format, there is help in the library.

Answer 1

Navigating the unique cultural and religious needs of your patients can be unnerving. You could accidentally offend your patient or their family by not knowing about a crucial cultural practice or you could witness something that goes against your personal beliefs or convictions.

One of the most important elements emphasized in pursuit of competent cultural care is identifying your own beliefs and culture before caring for others. According to Culture Advantage, an organization formed to help individuals develop cross-cultural awareness and communication skills, “Caregivers are expected to be aware of their own cultural identifications in order to control their personal biases that interfere with the therapeutic relationship. Self-awareness involves not only examining one’s culture but also examining perceptions and assumptions about the client’s culture.” Developing this self-awareness can bring into view the caregivers biases or culturally-imposed beliefs. It can also shed light on oppression, racism, discrimination, and stereotyping and how these affect nurses personally and their work.

As an example, a nurse might learn that a patient participates in folk medicine, which incorporates certain unfamiliar healing rituals, or promotes the ingestion of an array of plant-based concoctions as mixed and prescribed by a healer. Without examining his/her own beliefs, the nurse might judge those practices as primitive or scientifically bogus without having a clue about the cultural or symbolic meaning. Meanwhile, the following Sunday that nurse may head to a church service donning a crucifix around her neck—a violent death symbol to the casual observer—where she recites strange, nonsensical liturgy back to a man dressed in a robe and consumes a little cracker and grape juice or wine and calls it “the body and blood of her savior.”

Three levels of organisational culture in healthcare78

Visible manifestations of healthcare culture include the distribution of services and roles between service organisations (such as the long established divides between secondary and primary care and between health and social care), the physical layouts of facilities (receptionists behind desks and doctors in consulting rooms), the established pathways through care (including the ubiquitous outpatients appointment), demarcation between staff groups in activities performed (and the tussles that challenge or reinforce these), staffing practices and reporting arrangements, dress codes (such as different coloured scrubs for different staff groups in emergency departments), reward systems (pay and pensions, but also the less tangible rewards of autonomy and respect), and the local rituals and ceremonies that support approved practices. Visible manifestations of culture (sometimes called artefacts) also include the established ways (both formal and informal) of tackling quality improvement and patient safety, the management of risk, and the accepted ways of responding to staff concerns and patient feedback or complaints.

Shared ways of thinking include the values and beliefs used to justify and sustain the visible manifestations above and their associated behaviours, as well as the rationales put forward for doing things differently. This might include prevailing views on patient needs, autonomy, and dignity; ideas about evidence for action; and expectations about safety, quality, clinical performance, and service improvement.

Deeper shared assumptions are the (largely unconscious and unexamined) underpinnings of day-to-day practice. These might include ideas about appropriate professional roles and delineations; expectations about patients’ and carers’ knowledge and dispositions; and assumptions about the relative power of healthcare professionals—collectively and individually—in the health system.

Mental health providers and professionals across the world have to work with clients that are often from cultures other than their own. The differences in cultures have a range of implications for mental health practice, ranging from the ways that people view health and illness, to treatment seeking patterns, the nature of the therapeutic relationship and issues of racism and discrimination. Attitudes toward mental illness vary among individuals, families, cultures, and countries. Cultural and religious teachings often influence beliefs about the origins and nature of mental illness, and shape attitudes towards the mentally ill. In addition to influencing whether mentally ill individuals experience social stigma, beliefs about mental illness can affect patients’ readiness and willingness to seek and adhere to treatment. Therefore, understanding individual and cultural beliefs about mental illness is essential for the implementation of effective approaches to mental health care. Although each individual’s experience with mental illness is unique, the following studies offer a sample of cultural perspectives on mental illness.

Finally, presenting mental health care services in culturally-sensitive ways may be essential to increasing access to and usage of mental health care services, as local beliefs about mental health often differ from the Western biomedical perspective on mental illness. For example, one study comparing Indian and American attitudes toward mental illness surveyed students at a university in the Himalayan region of Northern India and at a university in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States. The Indian students were more likely to view depression as arising from personally controllable causes (e.g. failure to achieve goals) and to “endorse social support and spiritual reflection or relaxation” as ways to deal with depression. The authors report that “conceptualizations and treatments” for depression should take into account diverse perspectives on mental illness in order to maximize the effectiveness of mental health care delivery programs