Cultural competency is an essential aspect of the healthcare system. Improvement of cultural competency is a critical approach by which racial and ethnic health disparities among the healthcare administrators, clinical practitioners, and staff can be reduced. Culturally competent, knowledge, skills, and attitudes improve the provision of patient-centered care services. Cultural diversity in patients entails factors such as; socioeconomic factors, race, health beliefs, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, gender and religion (Purnell, 2014). The increased diversity present both benefits and challenges for health care providers, policy makers and health care systems in general thus the need to perform cultural competency assessment to create this awareness. The objective of this paper is to complete a cultural competency assessment of a friend. For this evaluation, the interviewee’s name will be Adams though fictional to conceal his identity.
Adams is 65 years old from the southern part of Mexico. He is a retired teacher and lives in California with her daughter. Adams arrived in California a year ago where he has been under home nursing care. He had been diagnosed with arthritis and diabetes type 2. He and the daughter spend a significant amount on his treatment from Adams’ retirement benefits and pension. Adams use is bilingual although he is competent in Spanish than in English the language of his current culture of residence. Consequently, there is a problem of the language barrier. Nonetheless, with the intervention of his daughter the communication is made easier through interpretation. His relationship with the nurse is, however, good.
According to the assessment, Adam has been a widower. He has also been involved in community social worker back in Mexico before the onset of the condition and his subsequent migration to California to seek medical attention. Despite his condition, Adams spends a lot of time reading, watching television and doing simple exercises although due to reduced mobility he rarely exercises. Adams had a history of alcohol use which he quit upon his diagnosis with diabetes. He is under medication which is also supplemented with proper nutrition. He has a personal nutritionist who recommends what he should eat. Adams is a vegetarian and do not eat fast foods or take cold beverages. Additionally, Adams had undergone the vasectomy as a method of family planning because her deceased wife could not be put under any method of family control due to her health condition.
Adams’s response to death rituals was that they did not have complex rituals for deaths and just followed the formal way of burying. Nonetheless, he is a strong believer and a Christian. Though he is not opposed to traditional methods of treatment, he does not opt for it and instead focuses on biomedical treatments. Neither does he rely on magicoreligious nor self-medication practices.
Deriving from the assessment, cultural competency is essential not only for the healthcare provider but also for the patient. It creates understanding and improves health care. However, there is the need to improve on linguistic competency to minimize communication barriers that may challenge the building of nurse-patient centered care (Purnell & Pontious, 2014). The patient may also require alternative methods of spending time in a manner that seeks to improve his health. Provision of transcultural healthcare can be enhanced through creating awareness on cultural disparities as well as being cultural tolerant.
- Purnell, L. D. (2014). Guide to culturally competent health care. FA Davis.
- Purnell, L., & Pontious, S. (2014). Cultural competence. Multicultural approaches to health and wellness in America, 1, 1-28.