The organization selected for the analysis in the New Harbor Memorial Hospital. The hospital under analysis is a part of Christiana Care Health System, which ranks 22nd in terms of hospital admissions in the US. Christiana Care Health System includes two hospitals with more than 1,100 patient beds, a home health care service, preventive medicine, rehabilitation services, a network of primary care physicians, and an extensive range of outpatient services. Thus, New Harbor Memorial Hospital is an advanced healthcare facility with no identified issues that threaten its financial well-being. However, the organization is facing the problem of the inability to meet the needs of the rapidly growing Latino population. In particular, the hospital is unable to provide culturally and linguistically competent services.
The identified problem suggests that two interventions need to be implemented. On the one hand, cross-cultural training intervention is required to improve the level of cultural competence of the medical personal. Jongen et al. (2018) describe two central approaches to increasing the level of cultural competence. The first approach is called cultural competence training, which presupposes that the medical person is provided with the knowledge of cultural peculiarities of different cultural groups (Jongen et al., 2018). The effectiveness of this approach is limited, as it divides people into several general groups, which fails to capture the peculiarities of the unique cultures of individuals (Jongen et al., 2018). The second approach is to provide general knowledge about how to provide culture-sensitive care in any cross-cultural situation (Jongen et al., 2018). This approach requires such training includes “eliciting patients’ explanatory models of health issues and their causes; strategies for negotiating shared understanding and facilitating participatory decision-making in creating treatment plans; and understanding health and illness in its biopsychosocial context” (Jongen et al., 2018, p. 2). This approach is associated with less bias, which implies that it would be best to address the identified problem.
Reference
Jongen, C., McCalman, J., & Bainbridge, R. (2018). Health workforce cultural competency interventions: a systematic scoping review. BMC Health Services Research, 18(1), 1-15.