Question

1. Briefly summarize diversity and cultural competencies in nursing homes.
2. Which of these diversity and cultural competencies do most nursing homes excel the most and why.
3. Choose one diversity and cultural competency barrier in nursing homes and describe this barrier in detail and what your recommendations would be to improve would be to help them improve.

Answer 1

1). Cultural competence in healthcare and hospitality is gaining the right knowledge, attitude, and skills to support and care for people across different cultures.Culture influences the way a patient perceives his illness, the caregiver and healthy habits.The following tenets guide every caregiver in becoming culturally competent:

• KNOWLEDGE: Gain sound knowledge about the cultures in the area where one operates, with respect to healthcare practices and beliefs.
• SKILLS: Gain effective communication skills to simplify communication with patients, whatever may be his/her mother tongue.
• ATTITUDE: Attitude is the most important aspect of providing healthcare. One must be aware of one's biases,prejudices with respect to other cultures and work proactively to avoid making stereotypical assumptions.

2.) The diversity and cultural competency that most healthcare providers are good at and the reason behind it are the following :

• Language Problems : The workforce of the hospitals and nursing homes include people from various cultural and ethnic backgrounds. So they possess the capability to converse with people with a different mother tongue and even if the immediate caregiver may not speak the language, he/she would definitely know or have a friend/colleague who speaks the required language. The person would then avail the help of his/her colleague to understand and provide adequate care to the patient or he may assign the case to his colleague who speaks the language. In addition to this the nursing homes management staff are trained regularly in learning different languages based on the language the local population mostly speak.

3.) Barriers to cultural competencies in healthcare and nursing sector include the following :

• Lack of knowledge of local cultural traditions, bias, apathy of the management, busy schedules and low prioritizing : Cultural differences between patients and nurses affect effective service delivery. Caregiver’s opinion may be different about disability, independence and role of each gender in home based healthcare from the patient and his family. Bias and prejudices exist in the minds of every person and it is not possible to get rid of completely as it is shaped by our experiences and interaction. However conscious efforts must be made in terms of cross-cultural training that minimizes the impact of biases in nursing operations and provide the patient with the optimal healthcare he deserves. Hospital management boards may assign lower priorities to cross cultural competencies simply because they have much complicated issues to tackle. But this does not reduce the importance of it as cultural inefficiencies are a major dissatisfier for patients. The management must be made aware of the long-term implications of cultural competencies and urge them to take proactive action to train their staff and nurses to be culturally sensitive to patients.

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