Healthcare Cultural Challenges in the Next Five Years
Describe five cultures that are currently influencing healthcare and effecting delivery decisions. Discuss each culture in detail and describe potential challenges to healthcare delivery. Include a discussion of how you would address nursing staff ensuring that these cultures were handled with respect and appropriate care delivery behavior. Use at least 2 scholars as references.
Sample Answer
Culture in Health Care
The influence of culture in healthcare is vast. It impacts the perceptions of illness, health, and death, beliefs about the causes of death, approach health promotion, and how pain and illness are experienced and expressed. Cultural competence helps the health care practitioners address the patients’ needs and relate to the patients more. Competence is also essential in overall excellence in healthcare delivery and can directly affect the patient’s safety, treatment and treatment results. To deliver the most effective care, providers must acknowledge the cultures and diversity of the people that they serve. However, culture may affect health care as well as involve the delivery sessions. Some examples of cultures that affect health care delivery are language, values, norms, institutional, and socioeconomic culture. All these cultures influence healthcare delivery decisions. This paper aims to discuss these five cultures, including the potential challenges to healthcare delivery. The essay will also discuss the challenges of the culture to healthcare and how to address the nursing staff to ensure that the cultures are handled with respect and appropriate care delivery behavior.
Language
Language refers to the terms of speech used by people of different communities in communication. Patients and the health practitioners involved in the health care system have different language cultures, which calls for cultural competency (Junior et al., 2020). Cultural competency enables the patients and the health practitioners to understand each other during communication between the two parties. However, the artistic language may pose some challenges during health care delivery.
Challenges of the Language Culture
Language barriers in the health care system impact the quality of the service delivered to the patient. Regardless of the language barriers, the health care providers are still expected to provide quality healthcare that adheres to the principles of human rights and equity to all. The language barrier causes miscommunication between the health care practitioners and the patients. The health practitioners may get a wrong interpretation of the patient’s diseases and therefore administer an incorrect diagnosis, which lowers health service quality. The second challenge is that the patients with a language barrier are more likely dissatisfied. The patient who cannot use understandable language may receive the wrong treatment, resulting in dissatisfaction. Health disparities such as unequal treatment, which is associated with the language barrier, can be linked to unequal access to health care and unequal health care outcomes. A recent study showed that patients who lack knowledge of the local language are disadvantaged regarding access to health care services. Moreover, the patients facing the language barrier problem demonstrate poorer health outcomes than patients who speak the local language (Al Shamsi et al., 2020).
Possible Solutions of the Language Culture
The nurses should engage in some possible solutions to provide the best health care service for delivery. They should be educated on interpreter services used during health care delivery. Additionally, education on technology advancement on voice recognition software, which contains a collection of medical questions and instructions for health care delivery, can also be beneficial.
Values
Values refer to the combination of beliefs and ideas that are entitled to a specific community. In the healthcare field, diverse patient values can cause differences between the patients and health care providers. Some examples of cultural values to the nursing field is where some communities believe that the kind of treatment decision for the patient should be collectivism such as the community or family rather than individualism. Other cultures prohibit the application of various medications.
Challenges of the Values Culture
The nurses may face some challenges in delivering health care services to patients who have different values. For example, a patient may have a wrong perception of treatment, such as those who believe that only God heals (Black, 2019). The nurses experience a hard time explaining the kind of medication to a patient with a negative cultural value hence delaying the delivery process. It is essential that all patients are treated with dignity and that healthcare providers acknowledge their value as individuals. One of the most mentioned elements of disrespect to the patients is failing to pay attention to patient needs which leaves them unattended.
