The Importance Of Cultural Competency Care

To understand cultural competence care, we need to first examine cultural competence.
According to the National Institute of Health (NIH) (2015) cultural competence is defined as:
“Culture is often described as the combination of a body of knowledge, a body of belief and a body of behavior. It involves a number of elements, including personal identification, language, thoughts, communications, actions, customs, beliefs, values, and institutions that are often specific to ethnic, racial, religious, geographic, or social groups”.
For healthcare professionals who provide health information, “these cultural elements influence beliefs and belief systems surrounding health, healing, wellness, illness, disease, and delivery of health services” (NIH)

Awareness of cultural differences and their impact on health outcomes is based on increasing education and providing training to health care professionals by adopting cultural and linguistic standards and guidelines needed to raise cultural competence care awareness in medical schools and other medical health care training programs. In doing so, we are not only recognizing the major component of cultural differences in healthcare, but also recognizing cultural competence care can help in identifying potential links in reductions in health disparities and proper delivery of health care information and health care to the patient (NIH, 2015). Cultural competency care benefits not only the patient, but also the healthcare system as a whole, as it can promote good health practices and eliminate culturally incompetent care, which according to Peterson-Iyer (2008) can ultimately encourage practical problems, such as decreased patient compliance, obtaining a true informed consent, and may increase risk of liability for malpractice. Overall, health care should be designed to meet the needs of all ethnicities and cultures and not simply those who belong to the ethnic and cultural majority (Epner & Baile, 2012). In a diverse world, healthcare must respect, accommodate, and take responsibility for the social and health burden for improving culturally competence. This responsibility should not just be to the patient, but also to the healthcare professionals, institutions, and medical training