The paradigm of nursing could be justifiably represented as the process of intermediation between the public and health care facilities. Thus, the attention paid by the nurses to the cultural peculiarities of the patients plays a crucial role in terms of public institutions’ reaction to the existing socio-economic gap in terms of people’s access to health care. Thus, the primary goal of recognizing bias, stereotypes, and cultural obstacles should be met through explicit discussion of patients’ well-being and perception in society.
Some of the major cultural challenges concern the concepts of ethnic affiliation and one’s denomination. In order to resolve this issue, nurses should address the LEARN framework. According to this framework, cultural competence may be achieved through the following actions:
- Listening to the patient’s perception of the problem with regard to their culturally predetermined specifics;
- Explaining the medical perception of the issue to the patient;
- Acknowledging the patient’s outlook and finding a compromise between the two points of view;
- Recommending a treatment plan;
- Negotiating the aspects that could be modified in the plan with regard to the patient’s suggestions and concerns (Falkner, 2018).
When cultural specifics are not taken into account by healthcare providers, there is a higher probability of poor patient outcomes and people’s subconscious unwillingness to trust healthcare providers. According to the researchers, the vast majority of implicit bias cases, especially when it comes to the notion of race, emerge as a result of poor provider-patient communications, leading to the so-called provider bias (Maina et al., 2018). Thus, having closely regarded a qualitative example of cultural issues and their perceptions by health care providers, it may be concluded that one of the most efficient ways to eliminate the problem is for community health nurses to put much effort into quality interpersonal communication with clients.
References
Falkner, A. (2018). Community as client. In Community & public health: The future of health care. Grand Canyon University.
Maina, W., Belton, T. D., Ginzberg, S., Singh, A., & Johnson, T. J. (2018). A decade of studying implicit racial/ethnic bias in healthcare providers using the implicit association test. Social Science & Medicine, 199, 219-229. Web.