Cultural awareness

CULTURAL AWARENESS


I. INTRODUCTION
Cultural awareness and competency is an essential part of working in a health care
environment. Cultural competence is a set of attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and policies
that enable organizations and staff to work effectively in cross-cultural situations1.
Health-related beliefs, disease prevalence, and treatment efficacy are all part of the health
related issues of different populations that providers should have awareness on.
Avoiding stereotypes is also an essential part of cultural awareness. It is important to
remember that diversity is exists in all groups.
II. CULTURAL AWARENESS POINTERS
Some important points that providers should remember about cultural awareness
include2:
• Clinicians need to “check their own pulse” and become aware of personal
attitudes, beliefs, biases, and behaviors, that may influence (consciously or
unconsciously) care of patients as well as interactions with professional
colleagues and staff from diverse racial, ethnic, and sociocultural backgrounds.
• Every clinical encounter is cross-cultural. Developing partnerships with
patients and maintaining “cultural humility” can help clinicians to learn and
better understand the historical, familial, community, occupational, and
environmental contexts in which patient’s live.
• It should be understood that there is no “one” way to treat any racial and ethnic
group, given the great sociocultural diversity within these broad classifications.
We need instead to have a framework of interventions that can be
individualized and applied in a patient- and family-centered fashion.
• Clinical and preventative care needs to be evidence-based, flexible, authentic,
and ethical. We need to appropriately tailor interventions to patients, families,
and communities.
• Cookbook approaches about working with patients from diverse sociocultural
backgrounds are not useful and instead risk potentially dangerous stereotyping
and overgeneralization. Important intergenerational differences exist, and
diversity is often greater within groups than between them.
• It is important to understand not only patient and community barriers to care,
but also physician and health care system barriers to care. To eliminate racial
1 Lavizzo-Mourney and Mackenzie. “Cultural Competence: A Journey” 1996.
2 J. Betancourt & R. Like. “Editorial: A New Framework of Care” 2000
RI Department of Health Family Planning Guidelines
2
and ethnic disparity, health care providers and organizations need to become
more culturally and linguistically competent.
• We need to challenge and confront racism, sexism, classism, and other forms
of prejudice and discrimination that occur in clinical encounters as well as in
the society-at-large.
Through collaboration and achieving a better understanding and appreciation of our
commonalities and difference, patients and physicians can become empowered to work
together with others to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health care2.