Cultural Competence in Healthcare for Diversity- myassignmenthelp

Question: Discuss about theCultural Competence in Healthcare for Diversity. Answer: Reflection Diversity within a nation brings with it both opportunities and challenges in the health care system. It has become increasingly important for the providers of care, the policy makers and the health care systems to embrace cultural competence in provision of services (Jeffreys, 2015). According to Ang and Van (2015), cultural competence can be defined as possession of the qualities and ability to provide healthcare services that are effective and that meet the social and cultural needs of the patient. When healthcare providers are culturally competent, there is a high likelihood of improvement of health outcomes and quality of care. It can also lead to a significant elimination of health disparities that result from racial and ethnic differences. This paper reflects my values, beliefs and behaviours and how they contribute or may detract me from being a culturally safe practitioner in a multicultural healthcare environment. Personal values affect the cultural competence of a healthcare provider, either positively or negatively. I have mastered the art of confidentiality. In my day to day life, I endeavour to maintain confidentiality of information revealed to me. This means that I do not share such information without the go ahead of involved parties or where such revealing will be a breach of confidentiality. I believe that this is a positive attribute and would improve my cultural competence while offering care to patients. As Shen (2015) observes confidentiality is likely to make a patient trust the health care provider and reveal even more information that is necessary for optimal care. I also possess the value and quality of integrity. Being honest leads to more trust in human relations (Han and Cho, 2015). Consequently, this would be a great contributor to cultural competence in a multicultural setting since it would mean that I am providing the patients with truthful information in every step of the care process. This is in turn likely to improve the health outcomes and quality of care. Resilience is another quality that I would boast of but only to a certain extent. I do persist in carrying on with an activity even if there seems to be little success, but after some time I tend to give up. This is an attribute that would reduce my cultural competence since sometimes events in healthcare provision would need resilience. For instance, when dealing with a patient who takes quite some time to grasp information, resilience would be a key factor to promote successful health education. As such it is a key value in ensuring cultural competence when working with people from different backgrounds (Gallagher and Polanin, 2015). The fourth value to be discussed will be empathy. In my interaction with people, I have learnt to imagine I was in their own shoes to understand how they feel and offer the help I can. This is potentially a great value when it comes to cultural competence. It would mean that I will effectively create helping relation with patients/clients and consequen tly improve the quality of care. It becomes a potential barrier to competence sometimes when it crosses over to sympathy. I easily become sympathetic. As demonstrated by Diaz, Clarke and Gatua (2015), sympathy may prevent development of a helping relationship between a healthcare provider and their patients/clients. Therefore, the attribute of empathy need to be strongly developed to reduce the incidences of sympathy. The values that one upholds play an important role in shaping their beliefs. If one has plenty of positive values, they are likely to uphold positive beliefs too. Beliefs in turn plays a role in shaping behaviour. The three (values, beliefs and behaviours) cumulatively determine the cultural competence of a person (Dauvrin and Lorant, 2015). The beliefs that I uphold and how they are likely to affect my cultural competence are discussed next. I believe that no one should be discriminated against due to their cultural background, race, gender and beliefs. I believe that such discrimination does no good and that it is unnecessary. For this reason, I can interact freely with persons of different beliefs, gender, cultural background and race. This would most likely affect my cultural competence positively. It would improve it since I would have little challenges interacting with professionals and patients/clients of different parameters mentioned above. It would however pose some challen ge where the culture of the region of work stipulates a belief that is different from mine. The second belief is that every person deserves respect and care. For this reason, I have learnt to treat other people with great care and respect just the way I would like to be treated myself. This would be a strong contributor to cultural competence. This is because I would treat my patients with outmost dignity and care. As Betancourt, Corbett and Bondaryk (2014) observes the two are likely improve the self esteem of the patients which may dramatically improve the health outcomes. The third belief is that of beauty/strength in diversity. I believe that diversity should not bring differences but unity. We all need each other for a peaceful and harmonious coexistence. The doctors, the engineers, persons with disabilities, different cultures etc., represent diversity. When we choose to see the beauty of the diversity we live well together and in peace. This belief would likely contribute positively to my cultural competence as I would view each person as unique and treat them as tha t. The fourth belief is appreciating other peoples cultures. Whenever I interact with persons from different cultures, I desist from treating my own culture as superior to theirs. Rather, I choose to believe that theirs is as important as mine. This belief would potentially contribute to my cultural competence. As demonstrated above, both values and beliefs shape a persons behaviour. In this paragraph, I am going to explore four behaviours and how they affect my cultural competence. These are directly or indirectly linked to the values and beliefs that I have explained above. Since almost all the details regarding the behaviours has been covered when discussing values and beliefs, only brief information is going to be provided here. The first behaviour is that I do respect every person. The second is that I demonstrate empathy. The third is that I appreciate each persons culture. The fourth is that I exhibit resilience. The first three behaviours are likely to make me more culturally competent. The fourth, however, as explained above, needs more improvement. I should learn to be more resilient to be more culturally competent. In conclusion, cultural competence is very important in the provision of healthcare. When the healthcare providers, the health care system and the policy makers become culturally competent, there is a high likelihood of improvement in health outcomes and the quality of care. The values, beliefs and behaviours of a person play a role in determining how culturally competent they are. They may contribute or detract one from being culturally competent. Being confidential, maintaining integrity, being empathetic contributes to this competent. Being sympathetic and not resilient enough on the other hand may detract one from being competent. The values and beliefs are directly or indirectly linked to the behaviours of a person. Consequently, they affect the cultural competence. References Ang, S., Van Dyne, L. (2015).Handbook of cultural intelligence. 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