Question

Culture comes to us in multiple forms, identify a "work place culture" you have experienced that may enhance or detract from providing culturally competent care to patients. Discuss the culture and your thoughts about its existence.

Answer 1

The workplace culture that came across was when a patient was admitted with severe hemorrhage due to trauma and identified as a Jehovah witness, who refused to receive blood transfusions, created a medical challenge, because of the ethical dilemma of whether to provide culturally competent care or protect the patient's life. It created a major obstacle to provide care to the patient. In this case, it detracted culturally competent care as there was no option left except blood transfusion to save the life of a patient.

Culture is a word for the 'way of life' of groups of people, meaning the way they do things. Different groups may have different cultures. A culture is passed on to the next generation by learning.

Culture is seen in people's writing, religion, music, clothes, cooking, and what they do.

The word 'culture' is most commonly used in three ways.

• The excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture.
• An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior.
• The outlook, attitudes, values, morals, goals, and customs shared by a society

National Cultures: These are what make countries unique. Each country has different cultural activities and cultural rituals. Culture includes material goods, the things the people use and produce. Culture is also the beliefs and values of the people and the ways they think about and understand the world and their own lives.

For example in Indian Hindu culture, they say Namasthe to greet the people.

Regional Culture: Cultures also vary within a region, society or subgroup. For example, in India, different parts of the country have different cultures. In India, they are divided as North-Indians and South-Indians. Stable food of North-Indians is Chapathis whereas south-Indians is Rice.

Organizational Culture: A  (groups of people) can have a separate culture. For example workplace culture in the IT sector is different from that of the Health care sector. In the IT sector, they work for 5 days a week but in the health care industry, they work 24/7.

In my view, culture can arise in any group of people that share common problems. We notice it in people who live in the same geographic area, people who share the same ideology or religion, and people who work together in a company. Cultures grow as people learn by taking on new ideas when they seem to work and by rejecting ideas that don't work or are inconsistent with their way of thinking. This happens when people move from one culture to another, bringing different ideas with them. Similarly when one company acquires another. Thus culture exists among people who share things in common.