Introduction
The work of a healthcare professional is a complex and challenging one. There are just so many things that one has to consider in order to provide the highest quality healthcare. Aside from competence when it comes to medical and allied health skills, healthcare professionals also have to make sure that the sociocultural aspects of healthcare provision are not taken for granted. In this paper, the author discusses the integral relationship between cultural competency and cultural safety, emphasizing its role in improving the outcomes on various levels as a health promotion officer.
Description of the Relevance and the Relationship between Culture, Ethnicity, Socioeconomic Status, and Cultural Competence
Culture is an important part of healthcare because it represents a certain population’s belief system. These belief systems often include health-related norms and practices . Depending on the culture, those norms and practices may either promote or impede the successful delivery of high quality healthcare . The same principle can be applied when describing ethnicity and its role in health promotion. Socioeconomic status, within the context of healthcare, can be defined as a measure of a person’s economic and social position or relevance in relation to others. This relative positioning system is often based on a complex set of factors that include (but may not be limited to) highest level of educational attainment, net worth, personal and or family income, occupation, and family background . Focusing on this variable’s relevance to the job of a health promotion officer, patients who belong to the higher socioeconomic classes (or those with more prestigious socioeconomic statuses) are often prioritized when it comes to the provision of high quality healthcare. Because of this, this factor has often been regarded as a source of inequity in an otherwise well-regulated healthcare system . And lastly, cultural competence; the truth is that there is no standardized or universal definition of this term. The term has however evolved (i.e. its definition) as a result of the continuous changes with the way how people, policy makers, and healthcare professionals perceive an entire healthcare system should be, how people should be treated, and what kind of privileges and protections they should receive. According to the broad definition of cultural competency provided by the National Medical Association, for example, it was defined as “the application of cultural knowledge, behaviors, and interpersonal clinical skills that enhances a provider’ effectiveness in managing patient care” . There are of course other more narrowed down versions of this definition. However, the essence of this and those other definitions remain practically the same in that they refer to the same independent variables that affect the outcome of healthcare. Now, when it comes to the relevance of these individual factors to the process of healthcare promotion, the safest answer would be that they each (culture and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and cultural competency) affect the outcome of healthcare differently. Culture and cultural competency, for example, may affect the way how a patient may be satisfied with the outcome of a treatment—especially when it is tailored to their cultural norms and traditions. Socioeconomic status, as another example, may affect the outcome of a healthcare service by means of segmentation—where individuals who belong to the top classes are provided with a higher quality of healthcare services compared to those who belong to the bottom.
How Cultural Competency at the Healthcare Provider and Institutional Levels Help Improve Health Outcomes
The best and most reliable way to determine how cultural competency affects the health outcomes is to compare its effects on two different levels: healthcare provider and institutional level. On a healthcare provider level, the main goal of course is to be able to provide a type of healthcare that is customized to what the client needs and expects based on his or her culture or ethnicity. A common example of this would be administering a treatment regimen for a female Muslim patient, especially when the husband is around. Muslim women are conservative. They tend to wear a lot of clothing in order to cover a large portion of their skin; a significant number of Muslims still practice this cultural tradition even when challenged by a medical condition. So, one way to exhibit cultural competency when treating a Muslim patient would be to allow or directly ask the husband to do the basic nursing tasks (if the health promotion officer is a nurse) such as draping and bed positioning. There are many ways how to tailor the entire plan of action in a way that it would be in accordance with the patient’s cultural or ethnic background. This is, in fact, where the correlation between being culturally competent and resourceful would be important to consider. Being resourceful, as it turns out, is a prerequisite for being culturally competent .
Cultural competency on an institutional level can help improve health outcomes on a much broader way compared to the type of cultural competency applied on a healthcare provider level. For example, the application of culturally competent health promotion practices can, in theory, lead to a positive surge in patient satisfaction ratings. Patients who belong to different cultures would most likely prefer to receive healthcare services and treatments from a hospital or medical institution that puts a high level of importance on their cultural and ethnic backgrounds compared to one that does not. Patient satisfaction ratings are just one of the many metrics that can be used to assess the effects of cultural competency on various levels . Policy makers often base their decisions on whether to propose or support reforms in existing healthcare policies on available data. If there are available data (from empirical studies) suggesting that the promotion of cultural competency indeed leads to a higher level of patient satisfaction (among other positive things), then chances are they are going to push for the reforms that have been identified as the causes of those positive changes —or in this case, promotion of a more culturally competent health promotion practice. This, on a broad level, is how cultural competency can affect health outcomes in a positive way on an institutional level.
Relation to Health Consumers
The health consumers may practically refer to the patients in a healthcare system. What the patients are after, just like in any other industry, is a healthcare service that is affordable, accessible, and of high quality . As long as the industry can meet these three criteria, there should not be any problem. However, the problem is that the lack of awareness of a significant number of health promotion officers on the importance of cultural competence and safety negatively affects the delivery of the ideal type of healthcare, and this is in fact where the present discussion on cultural competency and safety would be important.
What is needed to ensure a Culturally Safe Professional Practice?
Cultural safety, according to Ramsden (2011), is a notch higher than just mere cultural competency in that it involves cultural awareness, sensitivity, self-reflection and understanding of different values and norms (of a client), knowledge on how to empathize, and cultural advocacy. Based on this definition alone, the abovementioned qualities would be what are needed to ensure a culturally safe professional practice on all levels.
Specific Ways how a Health Profession can Provide Culturally Safe Health Services
There is no universal way to ensure and provide a culturally safe health service. The only way to be able to provide this ideal health care environment is to promote mutual trust and respect between the patient and the health care promotion officers and practitioners. If every stakeholder within the healthcare industry is to respect each other’s cultural and ethnical background, everything else should follow. Nurses, for example, would know what standard hospital practices when it comes to treatment may be deemed as offensive by some of their patients who have unique cultural practices when it comes to health.
Conclusions
In conclusion, cultural competency and cultural safety are two important independent variables that may also have a direct impact on the quality and outcome of healthcare services in a healthcare system. The consensus is that health promotion officers and practitioners should be critically aware of the different cultures and ethnic backgrounds that their patients may have and competent enough to create well-customized treatment plan to patients from various backgrounds.
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