Cultural diversity in healthcare is one of the most prevalent and challenging issues in healthcare systems throughout the world. In most countries, the population consists of people from diverse cultural backgrounds who need to be accommodated in the delivery of healthcare services. People with diverse ethnic and racial identities have been found to have the most unfavorable social determinants of health, such as access to quality education, food, and housing. The varying cultures and traditions of the population challenge the effective delivery of healthcare services since a competent and holistic care delivery plan should be adopted to ensure equitable access and the delivery of quality care among the members of the population. According to Sustainable Development Goal 3, all members of the population should live healthy lives with enhanced well-being at all ages, hence the need to bridge the cultural diversity gaps in healthcare. As the patient population grows more diverse, there is a need for healthcare systems to provide care that is tailored to meet the needs and expectations of patients from various cultural backgrounds by offering personalized and effective patient care. Essentially, addressing the issue of cultural diversity in healthcare can be essential in ensuring that all members of the population are provided with opportunities to have access to quality healthcare services, thereby reducing the broad implications of cultural diversity in healthcare. Thus, this paper provides insights into cultural diversity in healthcare by providing an analysis of its significance, the barriers to ensuring the delivery of culturally competent care, and the strategies that can be utilized to enhance cultural competence among healthcare professionals.
In healthcare systems, cultural diversity plays a major role in influencing the quality and accessibility of care that patients of diverse backgrounds are provided with. As such, cultural diversity in healthcare requires healthcare providers to devise strategies that help them meet the needs of the diverse members of the population as a way of addressing the disparities that are associated with the provision of health services. Without experiences of cultural diversity, it is almost impossible for healthcare providers to develop the cultural competence that is essential in facilitating the effective delivery of healthcare services. Culturally competent professionals in healthcare settings find it easier to navigate through the potential misunderstandings and challenges that might arise as a result of cultural diversity. Most studies have established that conflicts and misunderstandings in healthcare settings arise as a result of the lack of the necessary cultural competence among the care providers, which makes it difficult for them to establish good relationships with patients and other healthcare professionals from different cultural backgrounds (Handtke et al., 2019). Reduced medical errors are also attributed to cultural competence that healthcare professionals exhibit, including misdiagnosis, adoption of inappropriate treatments, and non-adherence to medical advice. Culturally incompetent healthcare professionals are prone to providing culturally inappropriate medical advice that the patients, due to their cultural restrictions, cannot adhere to. Hence, there is a need to ensure that healthcare professionals possess the required cultural competence.
The provision of patient-centered care in healthcare settings is also linked to the providers having the necessary cultural competence. Every culture throughout the world has its own specific practices and beliefs that are associated with illness and health. Understanding the various beliefs of the cultural backgrounds that a person deals with is essential to tailoring care in a way that aligns with the needs and cultural expectations of the diverse population. Culture also plays a key role in determining how health is perceived and how healthcare is used among the members of the population (Ten & Li, 2016). For those working in different cultures, understanding the community’s perception of health and how they use health will make it easier for healthcare professionals to provide patient services in a way that is based on the specific needs and beliefs of the patients. Culturally competent healthcare professionals find it easy to acknowledge the patient’s traditional remedies to treatment and understand their views on particular healthcare procedures that might be against their cultural conduct. The delivery of personalized care is also based on the ability of healthcare professionals to build trust with their patients. Cultural competence allows them to interact with the patients in a way that indicates that they have respect for and understanding of their cultural backgrounds. This aspect has the ability to enhance the patient’s trust in the healthcare professionals, thereby providing them with open conversations and thus the establishment of a better patient-provider relationship.
In addition, culturally competent care enhances patient satisfaction through the adoption of appropriate and friendly treatment plans and a better understanding of health instructions. Depending on whether the patients understand the instructions from the doctor and the plans involved in their treatment, patients from different cultures are bound to exhibit differing treatment outcomes. Professionals who are culturally competent will easily navigate the cultural differences that the patients may exhibit and tailor the treatment plans to align with their cultural beliefs and health needs (Young & Guo, 2020). Doing this ensures all members of the population feel involved in their treatment plans, despite their cultural differences. It is also worth noting that professionals will feel more at ease working in an environment where their cultural needs are appreciated and where bias and stereotypes are minimal. Essentially, communication and collaboration among healthcare providers rely on the ability to establish respectful and professional relationships, and recognizing the other healthcare provider’s cultural orientation can make it difficult to establish patient-centered care.
Besides, the promotion of health equity also relies on enhancing cultural competence among healthcare professionals. Equitable access to healthcare services is one way of reducing the healthcare disparities that exist in the society. Culturally competent care seeks to respect diversity and cultural factors that can affect health and healthcare, such as attitudes, communication styles, behaviors, and beliefs. In the United States, the Office of Minority Health, Department of Health and Human Services have national standards for culturally and linguistically appropriate services to improve the health of people. Through this, the department seeks to ensure that all members are provided with the necessary healthcare services, thereby addressing the existing healthcare disparities. Among the minority population, there tends to be an advanced rate of conditions such as chronic illness that burden the healthcare system. Here, attempts to provide care to minority groups can be a great challenge and would require ensuring that healthcare professionals exhibit the desired cultural competence.
Despite the diverse impacts that the provision of competent care can have on the population and healthcare system in general, the provision of such care can be limited by various factors. One of these challenges is the limited cultural awareness among the healthcare providers, which makes it difficult for them to know how to relate to the diverse population. Most healthcare professionals do not have the required cultural training that they are supposed to utilize to interact with patients. The lack of cultural competence inhibits the ability of the providers and the organizations, meaning that the healthcare provider will not be capable of providing care in a way that meets the needs of the patients. Cultural awareness is mostly developed through interactions and by learning about the beliefs, traditions, and cultural expectations of the population from healthcare providers (Vela et al., 2022). The lack of the necessary training program among healthcare providers has made it challenging to make decisive moves when interacting with patients from different societies. To promote awareness, the healthcare system needs to develop awareness programs that familiarize healthcare professionals with the approaches that can be used in dealing with the diverse population.
Limited resources in the healthcare system to support cultural competence among healthcare providers can also be a major challenge. The realization of competence in the provision of care requires resources that can include interpreters, cultural competence trainers, linguistically diverse materials, and diverse staff recruitment programs (Chae et al., 2020). In some cases, these resources may be challenging to acquire, and this would mean that the development of culturally competent professionals will be challenging. For instance, for healthcare professionals to be trained on how to establish relationships with patients from different cultures, then a trainer and other resources such as reading materials and finances are needed, and the inability of a hospital to achieve this would make it difficult for the professionals to be trained. Also, patients from marginalized communities may also face barriers in the attempt to access culturally competent care due to such things as lack of health insurance, transportation challenges, and economic constraints. Therefore, having the necessary and required resources applies not only to the providers but also to the patients as it determines their ability to access the healthcare services provided.
Healthcare providers can also have stereotypes and biases that can hinder their ability to understand and address the differences in beliefs, values, and practices among diverse patients. The attitude of a healthcare professional towards a particular culture or group of people determines how they will approach the patients and how likely they are to respect their cultures and practices. Implicit bias among healthcare professionals can result in unequal access to resources and disparities in the provision of care (Lekas et al., 2020). Whenever a patient experiences bias in the healthcare system, their trust in the system is eroded, minimizing the chances of any collaborative practices that could be utilized to foster professional practices. Besides, barriers within the healthcare system, including established policies, organizational culture, and practices, are the basis upon which stereotypes and bias can be based, and the existence of unfavorable policies and practices is only meant to ensure continuity in the delivery of culturally incompetent practices. For instance, the current healthcare system may fail to accommodate patients from different groups in healthcare insurance plans, develop and provide healthcare infrastructure, and access culturally relevant information. This shows that the manner in which the healthcare system is organized determines its ability to accommodate patients from different cultural backgrounds.
In healthcare, various strategies can be utilized to develop culturally competent healthcare. One of these strategies is ensuring cultural competence for the providers, especially in patient-centered, culturally sensitive healthcare programs. Studies have shown that in the provision of care in clinics throughout the U.S., cultural competence training enhances the cultural sensitivity ratings of the providers based on attitudes and behaviors (Kaihlanen et al., 2019). Participants in cultural competence training usually express satisfaction with the competence that the training has provided them with since it provides them with real-world examples of how to deal with patients from diverse environments. For healthcare professionals, training is important in providing them with an opportunity to actively engage in open discussion of cultural issues in healthcare and how to handle such issues. Bias awareness training should form a part of healthcare education as a way of helping healthcare professionals recognize and understand cultural diversity and the ways and strategies they can adopt to minimize unconscious discrimination and bias in the delivery of care (Vela et al., 2022). Healthcare professionals need to be trained to respond appropriately to the diverse patient population in a manner that exhibits respect, understanding, and appreciation of different cultures (Handtke et al., 2019). Besides training the professionals, the patients also need to be trained on acknowledging the different cultural backgrounds of the providers and thereby come up with a support system that can help bridge the cultural gap to better relate with the healthcare providers, an aspect that can guarantee the delivery of healthcare services in an efficient manner.
Coming up with interventions to address the language barrier between healthcare providers and patients is also an essential strategy that should be adopted in the healthcare system to ensure cultural competency (Jongen et al., 2017). This strategy is based on the notion that communication barriers tend to arise in situations involving interactions among people from different cultures, and coming up with a way of avoiding the communication barrier that can arise will be an essential way of developing cultural competence. The communication barrier can be addressed by the integration of interpreters in the healthcare system to help bridge communication between the provider and the patient. This would consist of a person who is aware of the language of both cultures, their practices, and the perception of the culture towards healthcare services. Hiring bilingual staff will also help patients understand the language spoken by them easily and, thus, have an easier understanding of their cultures and traditions. Besides, the healthcare system can also adopt the use of language assistance resources, whereby the use of translated materials such as educational resources, medical instructions, and consent forms will be used instead of the use of the standard and foreign language (Young & Guo, 2020). Since patient-centered care is aimed at meeting the needs of patients, the resources that are used in the interaction with the healthcare professional should be easy to understand. Technological solutions such as the use of interpretation apps and software can help facilitate communication in situations where the communication barrier between the provider and the patient becomes apparent.
Another strategy that can be applied to ensure the development of cultural competence in healthcare is encouraging patient-provider interactions. In most cases, cultural diversity incompetence arises from the limited interactions between the healthcare providers and the patients, which makes it difficult for them to learn from each other and appreciate the cultural differences (Marcelin et al., 2019). The diversifying experiences are meant to provide the participants with counter-stereotypical experiences whereby, by engaging each other, the participants will learn more from each other, thereby fostering unbiased interactions. Here, efforts should be made to include professionals from underrepresented groups as preceptors and educators who will help reduce the unconscious association of the underprivileged population with certain attributes. Studies show that including ethical and cultural minorities in committees enhances interactions, which in return neutralizes any stereotypes regarding that group, an approach that can be considered useful in ensuring that possible biases are minimized.
Besides, cultural humility has also been found to be an effective strategy in the move to establish cultural diversity competence in healthcare. Cultural humility entails offering the participants teachings on cultural competency while steering them toward a path of continuous discovery and respect in their interactions with colleagues and patients from different cultural backgrounds (Marcelin et al., 2019). As such, cultural humility focuses on ensuring that a person recognizes the experiential lens through which they view the world and that their view is not as broad, open, or dynamic as they may tend to believe (Stubbe, 2020; Lekas et al., 2020). This approach is aimed at showing the participants that the other cultures are more than they seem to be, hence the need to experience them firsthand before judging them. Through this, professionals and patients are taught to be mindful and respectful of other people’s cultures and that they cannot consider themselves experts or the perfect culture (Curtis et al., 2019). Notably, cultures tend to be different, and the willingness and readiness of a person to learn the aspects of the other culture are essential indicators of their cultural competence as they help avoid assumptions. Cultural humility is specifically important in the recognition and mitigation of conscious and unconscious bias, and the adoption of training lessons that enhance the participant’s cultural humility is essential in ensuring cultural competence in healthcare.
In healthcare, the ability of professionals to accommodate patients from different backgrounds is essential to ensuring the effective delivery of quality services. Cultural diversity competence in healthcare not only enhances patient satisfaction but also facilitates the creation of a conducive work environment for healthcare professionals. Healthcare equity among people from diverse populations relies on the ability of healthcare professionals and the system to exhibit a high degree of cultural competence. Despite the attempts to ensure cultural competence, the efforts can be inhibited by the lack of the necessary resources, limited cultural awareness, and inherent stereotypes and bias among the providers, which continue to threaten the development of cultural competence among the employees. Since the effectiveness of the healthcare system is measured based on its ability to accommodate people from cultural backgrounds and provide them with quality care, the adoption of such practices as cultural humility, intercultural interactions, and addressing language barriers can significantly improve cultural competency in healthcare. With the changing nature of society, cultural differences among the members of the population are only expected to become more apparent determinants of health; hence, adopting the necessary strategies is essential.
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