Healthcare providers and their varying levels of cultural competence

Healthcare providers constantly face challenges and opportunities in different levels of cultural competence throughout the field. Maziwisa and Nampeera (2024) highlight some challenges and opportunities amongst healthcare professionals based on lack of cultural competence towards diverse populations within healthcare environments and when delivering healthcare services. The increasing change of the world comes with opportunities and challenges for healthcare providers, healthcare systems, and policymakers. It is vital to create and deliver culturally competent services to address these changes. A culturally competent healthcare system can lead to improved health outcomes, better quality of care, and contribute to eliminating racial and ethnic health disparities (Echeverri & Chen, 2016). Competence is a process involving the acceptance and respect for differences and not letting one’s individual cultural vindication have an influence on those with unfamiliar cultural perspectives (Lin et al. 2019).

Communication plays a vital role

Lack of cultural competence skills amongst healthcare professionals can lead to inequality care towards patients and decrease in the quality care delivered.  Communication barriers because of differences in communication skills and linguistic abilities, have led to misdiagnoses, inadequate holistic care and misunderstandings between the clients and the healthcare personnel, (Khatri & Assefa 2022). Stereotypes and assumptions towards patients from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds can affect clinical decision-making, lack of cultural sensitivity from healthcare providers can lead to biases that can affect the treatment process and quality care being given to the patients (FitzGerald & Hurst 2017).  Unconscious biases have led to the rise of assumptions, mistrust and decrease in quality care and services available to patients from different cultural backgrounds based on their race, ethnic backgrounds, sex orientation and cultural background (Jillian 2022).

However, healthcare professionals who display cultural competence skills and interest have been shown to have a successful patient care contact and a positive professional relationship between the healthcare providers and the clients. Creating a mutual understanding between different cultures develops the communication skills between both parties, allows respectful professional relationship growth, cultural competence skills development and positive attitude within the working environment which makes the work easier for the healthcare providers to handle. Healthcare workers practicing cultural humility which is recognised as one of the cultural competence components, experience several benefits, continuous learning towards self-reflection skills and appreciation of unfamiliar cultures, respect, optimal care, empowerment and partnerships. This makes the work easier, less tension in the work environment, positive health outcomes and high-quality care therefore leading to improved communication, positive health outcomes and high-quality patient care during care, (Foronda et al. 2015; Maziwisa & Nampeera 2024).

Cultural competence skills can present challenges and opportunities in the working environment due to differences in cultural backgrounds and varying levels of distribution of the skill amongst the working professionals. In healthcare environment, cultural competence is very important needs to be included as a requirement skill due to high migration flows in the populations around the world. Therefore, a multicultural healthcare environment and communities require cultural competence knowledge to change challenges into opportunities.

References

Echeverri, M. & Chen, AMH. 2016. Educational Interventions for Culturally Competent Healthcare: Developing a Protocol to Conduct a Systematic Review of the Rationale, Content, Teaching Methods, and Measures of Effectiveness.

Degrie, L., Gastmans, C., Mahieu, L., Dierckx de Casterlé, B. & Denier, Y. 2017. How do ethnic minority patients experience the intercultural care encounter in hospitals? A systematic review of qualitative research. BMC Med Ethics; 18.

FitzGerald, C. & Hurst, S. 2017. Implicit bias in healthcare professionals: a systematic review. BMC Med Ethics. 2017 Mar 1;18(1):19. doi: 10.1186/s12910-017-0179-8. PMID: 28249596; PMCID: PMC5333436. 

Foronda, C., Baptiste, D., Reinholdt, M. & Ousman, K. 2015. Cultural Humility: A Concept Analysis. 1177/1043659615592677 – Journal of Transcultural Nursing.

Jillian, A. R. 2022. The role of Implicit bias and culture in managing or navigating healthcare.

Khatri, R. B. & Assefa, Y. 2022. Access to health services among culturally and linguistically diverse populations in the Australian universal health care system: issues and challenges. BMC Public Health.  

Lin, M. H., Chang, T. H., Lee, Y. H., Wang, P. Y., Lin, L. H. & Hsu, H. C. 2019. Developing and validating the Nursing Cultural Competence Scale in Taiwan.  

Maziwisa, M. & Nampeera, J. 2024. Cultural Competence in Healthcare and Pre-Hospital Care. Thesis. LAB University of Applied Sciences. Cited 24 Nov 2024. Available at https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2024112730690