Question

1. what does a Healthcare Professional need to know to be culturally competent? Why is thus an essential skill for Healthcare Professionals?

2. what are the ethical responsibilities of a Healthcare Professional? Are the ethical expectations for Healthcare Professionals higher than in other professions?

Answer 1

Introduction

Cultural Competence is a part of health care field which bridges the gap between the cross cultural situations which ensures that each and every patient should be treated equally with adequate attention and gets their need met. Cross-cultural situations depends on cultural factors, norms, values, communication type and world views that helps to shape the personal and professional behavior of a health care professional. When healthcare professionals are aware of all types of culture, beliefs and behaviors of different groups then the interactions for them would be more easy and are free from the offensive responses and actions.

1. Why the health care professional need to know to be culturally Competence and its importance

Health care professional need to know about the cultural competence because the world is globalized and the trend will most likely to continue. Also, the poor communication between the healthcare providers and patients can lead to higher disparities and lower level of satisfaction with healthcare. As per the data, the disparities in healthcare and dissatisfaction are noticeable among racial minorities. For example, patients who speaks Spanish at home are less comfortable with nurses due to poor communication because they feel that the doctors or nurses doesn't respect or understood their beliefs and values and they also report that doctors looked down on them. This means that all health care professionals should be educated to deliver good quality care to the patients as a member of interdisciplinary team and it is very important for them to know to be culturally competence.

Let us discuss the various benefits of Culturally Competence

• Respect: It helps to gain the "Respect" of cultural competence-patients as they feel that the health care providers respect their belief, customs and values which will help them to communicate freely and honestly and which in turn reduces the disparities in healthcare and improves the outcome of patients.
• Active and unbiased listening: It helps to the doctors to listen actively to the patients problem without having a language barrier which in turn is helpful for them to make unbiased decisions.
• Understanding the various factors: It helps to recognize the important role of cultural, social and behaviors factors when it is the best time to decide the best method of delivering health care services to the patients.
• Encouragement of expression: It helps to encourage the expression, ideas and opinions of different individuals of different cultural and their perspective in health care system.
• Sensitivity: It helps to develop interacting sensitivity, effectively and professionally amongst all ages of people, lifestyle, races etc.

2. Ethical responsibilities of a Healthcare Professional and are the ethical expectations for Healthcare Professionals higher than in other profession.

Ethical responsibility is the ability to act upon the multiple principles and values standards set by the health care organizations. It is very important for them to take care of ethical responsibilities to deliver the best quality treatment to the patients. Below are the ethical responsibility of Healthcare professionals:

• Fair and Effective: Healthcare professionals are responsible for fair and effective use of health care resources to promote the comprehensive and affordable healthcare services of high quality.
• Be helpful and generous: It is very important to be helpful and generous to all poor and uninsured patients. Health care professionals should take initiative in taking extra care of them.
• Transparency: Health care professionals should inform patients about the patient care alternatives transparently. Making money should not be the priority for any healthcare professional.
• Public Welfare: Healthcare is a profession which is meant to do public welfare as doctors is compared to gods and they should live up to that expectation.
• Maintain patient’s personal information safely and securely.

Ethical expectations are higher in healthcare professionals because healthcare is very vulnerable industry and it affects the lives of people in many ways. Patients trust their healthcare providers to give them good quality treatment and make them healthy again. The need of ethics is very high as a non ethical behavior can lead to serious discrepancy even loss of lives.