Culturally Competent Care Reflection#1 (10-18-2011)

In this unit, we’re going to be learning about Culturally Competent Care. I personally feel that Culturally Competent Care means providing the best possible care and service without any regard to culture, which contains anything from ethnicity to appearance, language, and diet. It doesn’t matter what the patient’s “culture” consists of, you still need to treat them with the same respect and care that you would a normal patient.

 We also learned about an implicit association, which is a direct thought about something, or a “stereotype”, without knowing anything about that certain person or object. An example would be if you think of a Jewish person, you’d think of someone wearing a yamaka. If you say picture an Asian, you automatically think of someone Asian eating rice.

There was a test to test your preference towards certain subjects or types of people, called the IAT’s. I took one to see my preference between Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan. I got the result of a preference towards Barack Obama over Reagan, probably because I have really grown up under Obama, not because he caused me to, but because he was a familiar face while I was growing up.

As a class, we composed many definitions of culture into a mind map, and there is many things that culture could necessarily mean. We as a class came up with a way of life, societal based, a state of mind, and that its influenced by the way we were raised. There are different aspects of culture, also, which include diet, appearance, ethnicity, and language that influence what “culture” you belong to.

Being culturally competent is very important in a medical setting, because when an individual of a different ethnicity, or culture walks in with a condition, you’re obliged to help them no matter what you think of that. So, it is very important to be culturally competent with any culture, in order to provide the best possible care in any possible situation. No matter who it is, it could be a killer of Hispanic ethnicity, with a stab wound. No matter what you’d like to do to that person to get “revenge”, you are under the oath you took as a professional to help them. Cuulturally Competent care plays into this greatly.