ANSWER:
Cultural assessment is vital in all workplace environments. Moreover, nurses and other health workers must embrace it to improve their service delivery, avoid biases, and decide on the best intervention plans that suit the patient’s condition and confine them to their cultural beliefs. Cultural assessment involves an attempt to understand the patient’s distinguishing beliefs, values, and practices to predict the outcomes, experiences, and patient expectations during the service delivery (Velarde, Ghani, & Adams, 2022). There are various guidelines for conducting patient cultural assessment in healthcare during diagnosis to improve the patient’s satisfaction.
One way of conducting the cultural assessment is though developing a questionnaire used during the diagnosis where the nurses try to consider the problem as a medical illness rather than a mythical circumstance. One way of doing this is by formulating the question so that patients try to explain the pain rather than the emotional feeling at the moment. Further, nurses should try to find out the root cause of the problem from the patient’s perspective (Sanchez et al., 2021). As the patient explains it, the nurse can tell the difference between the cultures. To continue probing, an appropriate nurse should also evaluate the coping mechanism with the condition of the family and patients where they can reveal their practices. Hence, this gives the nurses better ideas of the intervention plans that suit the patients.
Being in the medical field allows practitioners to experience diversity daily, giving them more knowledge on handling different patients. For instance, there was a case where one patient was getting sick because of skipping meals in a day where the patient would only take one meal before sunrise. After probing, the practitioners realized that the patient was a Muslim and that they had to take only one meal before sunrise during the Ramadhan. Scientifically, during hot seasons, this can cause dehydration in human beings. Therefore, the nurses suggested a better diet that would allow the patient to survive long hours without eating food.
Sanchez, A., Jent, J., Aggarwal, N. K., Chavira, D., Coxe, S., Garcia, D., . . . Comer, J. (2021). Person-Centered Cultural Assessment Can Improve Child Mental Health Service Engagement and Outcomes. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 51(1), 1-22. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2021.1981340
Velarde, J., Ghani, M. F., & Adams, D. (2022). Towards a Healthy School Climate: The Mediating of Transformational Leadership on Cultural Intelligence and Organisational Health. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 50(1). Retrieved from https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8440-9564
QUESTION:
How would you perform a cultural assessment in a healthcare setting?
Give an example of how you have identified and/or demonstrated cultural assessment or sensitivity.
Cultural Assessment
Our readings address the thought that an evidence-based foundation to facilitate the delivery of culturally competent family nursing care, may help to decrease health risks and disparities among vulnerable populations.
“Health defined by one cultural group may be different than that for another cultural group. For example, a child with a seizure disorder may be described as healthy and protected by higher powers in the H’mong culture, whereas the same child may be described as ill and disabled in a Western culture.†(Fadiman, 1997)
How would you perform a cultural assessment in a healthcare setting? Give an example of how you have identified and/or demonstrated cultural assessment or sensitivity.
