Health Care Culture: Why It Matters For The Industry

Health care professionals have to show cultural competence toward patients that hold different beliefs, values, and feelings. Cultural competence factors in the cultural, social, and psychological needs of various patients to encourage productive communication with health care professionals. This helps to mitigate health differences and ensure optimal care is given to patients – no matter their gender, race, ethnic background, cultural or religious beliefs, or native languages spoken. Building a healthy health care culture is critical in areas where socialization is practiced, including nursing, medicine, mental health, pharmacy, and social work. Let’s explore in detail why health care culture is important for the industry.

Awareness

The awareness element of health care culture means being informed of an individual’s reactions to people who practice different cultural norms. Culture itself encompasses customs, languages, rules, beliefs, collective identities, memories, and knowledge shared within a group of people. These elements build the basis of actions or motives. Additionally, one must identify his or her own biases toward employees or patients. Low awareness of this may lead to unfairness in patient care. In fact, researchers at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and UC San Francisco discovered that roughly one in five patients who are 54 years old and older with chronic illnesses reported experiencing health care discrimination. This data was discovered in a survey done from 2008 until 2014.

Attitude

One of the pioneers who formulated multicultural competence, Paul Pedersen, theorized that competence practices comprised three factors: knowledge, skills, and awareness. The Diversity Training University International (DTUI) factored in attitude, an element that also plays a huge role in the analysis of general beliefs and biases as part of a person’s daily life. This is different from forcing individuals to understand their beliefs and values of cultural differences.

Knowledge

Meanwhile, cultural incompetency stems from the poor familiarity with the social and cultural experiences of patients. Patricia Devin, a social psychologist, performed research that found that those who scored low on a cultural familiarity test showcased more discriminatory speech or actions in interactions with people of different cultures. When knowledge, attitudes and awareness are given more attention in these situations, racism, inequitable relations, and ethnocentrism are eliminated.

Knowledge in this scenario also means being aware of the social, environmental, and structural obstructions that give meaning to specific actions in the lives of patients. In the Cross-cultural Counseling Inventory, health practitioners are studied by their understanding of the present socio-political system and how it impacts its clients. In 2017, approximately 20.5 million Hispanic, Native, and Black Americans lived beneath the poverty line. Without factoring in aspects like immigrant status, environment, and socioeconomic status, physicians would often show biases or stereotypes in their behavior.

Skills

Skills in health care culture involve integrating awareness and sensitivity into everyday experiences with patients. Developing skills include learning effective and respectful communication methods - whether between individuals or within a company. Studying communication cues includes examining body language, along with various non-verbal signs; certain gestures may hold extreme meanings in various cultures. The development of skills is an ongoing journey that requires one to reanalyze his or her belief system.