Question

discuss the role of communication in providing culturally competent health care. Identify specific actions you could take to overcome communication barriers (this includes but is not limited to language) when caring for limited English or non-English speaking clients/families.

Additionally, describe how knowledge of the relationship between culture and health belief systems to health and illness behaviors can help to facilitate improved patient outcomes.

Answer 1

Answer: Communication plays an important role in providing culturally competent healthcare. Due to excessive diversity in the population the healthcare professionals needs to enhance the patient care quality and this can be achieved through when healthcare professionals knows how to communicate with the people who speaks different languages or have different beliefs.

Because communication is only the meeans through which healthcare professionals will be able to understand about the needs, situation and the status of health of the patients as they expressed their feelings in their own language, so culturally competent is important.

To remove the communication barrier, healthcare professionals should know about some of the language, and the information about culture of the patients, if not possible then healthcare professionals should try to contact with the kin of the patient or try to find better common medium to translate the language.

The knowledge of the relationship between culture and health beliefs system to health and illness behaviour can help to facilitate improved patient outcomes as people of different cultures have various belief and they also have their mind set. So once we know or have knowledge about their beliefs we can easily tackle the situation by indulging that method in the care of the patient, so that Patient can mentally satisfied.