Essay Sample on Cultural Competence: Improving Health Care Experiences for Minority Patients

Introduction

Cultural competence is a rapidly growing strategy in solving the various health service injustices that the minority often fall victim to. It is a way of applying attitudes and values geared towards improving the health care experience by patients with different cultural backgrounds. Studies say that it is a dynamic area with lots of developments underway to equip health care professionals with suitable patient outcome related competencies (Horvat et al., 2014). This discussion, therefore, focuses on understanding culture, the role of human being on diverse cultural beliefs, ways of improving it.

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What It Means to Be a Culturally Competent Professional

A culturally competent professional is one that has and applies these values in ensuring the welfare of the patients regardless of the cultural affiliations. He or she should possess the ability to interact with people from distinct cultures constructively. There exist characteristics that culturally competent professionals identify them with. These are inclusive of comprehensive multicultural awareness, the right attitude in handling client patients, and the appropriate skills in the given field (Allan et al., 2017). Awareness in this situation is the realization of one's reactions to people from different cultures. These professionals should be well vast with how different persons adapt to new environments and what their possible reactions may be interacting with new people.

Attitude is a crucial element of consideration in handling patients visiting a facility. Their cultural beliefs greatly influence one's attitude. A culturally competent professional should not be biased in any way of treating patients. The need for the right attitude calls for examining the professional's cultural beliefs and values to ensure zero bias. Finally, there is a need for skills in the provision of services. Professionals in this area need to practice cultural competencies to perfection - following up to the later, the guidelines to cultural competencies. Communication being the most fundamental tool when it comes to interaction, it becomes one of the preliminary skills a professional in this field need to acquire. The communication skills should be inclusive of gestures and non-verbal skills that vary from culture to culture.

Multicultural Human Service

Human service is a diverse discipline whereby the service provider has to deal with people of different social backgrounds, families, or societies. Professionals in this field assist the subjects in overcoming various obstacles and help boost their performances. Regardless of how multi-disciplinary human service can be, there are common duties that are generally performed by professionals in this field. The professionals' main goal is to help improve the standard of living of their clients. This is achievable when they help solve the problems of their subjects.

Clients come with different problems that may be mental, physical, and even those that affect their emotions. It is the responsibility of the professionals to offer adequate counseling sessions to help do away with the stress or reduce it. Support groups have become very resourceful in providing human services. Formulation of these groups is a duty charged with the professionals to help curb all the forms of abuse that may exist during service delivery. The professionals may also be charged with the duty of resolving conflicts that their clients may be caught up in.

Challenges That Exist in the Multicultural Context

However, multicultural human service delivery may be constructive in life advancement; it is still prone to several challenges. Cultural differences among clients are a challenge, especially where the service provider may want two or more clients to work together to solve a problem. Another major drawback to effective communication during service delivery is the language barrier. This may call for a multilingual translator, which translates to extra costs incurred (Johnson et al., 2017). Technical changes in the administration and cultural differences in decision-making processes, among others, are also drawbacks.

Strategies That a Human Service Professional Use

As a way of improving competencies, professionals tend to look for solutions to the problems mentioned above. In cases whereby a language barrier exists, instead of hiring a multilingual expert, they may opt for going for the lessons so that they are diverse with their language capabilities. This not only helps with cutting the cost of service delivery but also beefing up the skills a professional would rather have. When a group is formulated, and the members have distinct cultural norms and practices, a professional will tend to take time and learn the different new norms for a smooth run of events (Johnson et al., 2017). He or she would also encourage the rest of the group members to do the same for an easy understanding of one another during dealings with the clients.

To resolve on the decision-making process, a professional must make clear to his or her multicultural team members their process when making decisions. This may not necessarily meet their expectations, but awareness creation is critical. It is also important that they understand the differences between the group subordinates and openly come up with resolutions on how decisions will be executed during service delivery.

Conclusion

There is a need to do further research in the field of human service delivery to better educational interventions, especially within the multicultural groups. This is essential since the groups play a critical role in upholding ethical issues. Such interventions will not only boost the effectiveness of the group but also perfect the roles of professionals in human service delivery. Besides these educative sessions, a simple healthy relationship between a professional and the members of the group can also boost service delivery.

References

Allan, R., McLuckie, A., & Hoffecker, L. (2017). Effects of clinical supervision of mental health professionals on supervisee knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviour, and client outcomes: Protocol for a systematic review. The Campbell Collaboration, 1-44.

Horvat, L., Horey, D., Romios, P., & KisRigo, J. (2014). Cultural competence education for health professionals. Cochrane database of systematic reviews, (5).

Johnson, M., Schuster, M., Le, Q. V., Krikun, M., Wu, Y., Chen, Z., ... & Hughes, M. (2017). Google's multilingual neural machine translation system: Enabling zero-shot translation. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 5, 339-351.