Cultural Communication In Health Care

774 Words4 Pages
Miscommunication, medication errors, and lack of compliance commonly occur in the healthcare field. These are just a few of the errors that occur due to the patient being from a different culture than the physician or healthcare worker. Those three errors alone have a huge impact on our healthcare today. If we could have a better understanding of other cultures that are different from our own we could have a dramatic decrease in errors and a great increase in healthcare participation. Multiple training methods must be used. The first step is to make sure that all physicians and health care workers get the same nationwide training that focuses on improving cultural competence (Horwitz, 2001). The goal of fixing and decreasing this issue is…show more content…
I chose this article because I have always known that culture was an issue to healthcare. I did not know how to go about addressing the issue, and I was not sure if physicians had to take a course on how to care for those from different cultures. It opens your eyes to see just how prominent this issue is. While it is important for physicians to learn about the culture to provide effective care, I believe that both nurses and physicians should have to take training both in school and while in the workforce. Training to improve cultural competence is something that also needs to be in place in the hospitals where there are broader and larger healthcare teams. After reading this article, I am going to become more aware of not only verbal cues but also non-verbal cues. For many of us it is easy to say the patient is non-compliant when that may not be the case at all. As a nurse myself, I plan to do more homework on the different cultures, learning about things like Eastern Asian culture not showing expression, as this is something that could help me in noticing a problem before it is too late. When caring for a patient from a different culture, I plan to take more time to visit with the patient by using different teaching methods. An example of this is that some cultures have the male be the decision maker. If I am teaching my patient, who is a female from a culture where the male makes the decisions, I need to make sure the male is in the room at that time as well. If I do not do this, the patient may listen, but they may not be able to answer them or participate in making a health care decision. Overall, I think this is a great, eye-opening article for any healthcare worker. Many of us does not realize just how important a small factor of culture is to the care we provide the patient (Horwitz,
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