Cultural Quality Healthcare

Cultural Quality Healthcare
Culture can be defined as the patterns of human behavior which includes the customs, action, thoughts, beliefs and values that bind an ethnic, racial, social or religious group within a community or society. It can also be referred to as what we live everyday and what we always bring with us to our places of work. Provision of quality healthcare to patients, aiding people to reform from their risky behavior patterns and being aware of the benefits which could accrue as a result of healthy living remain the big hallmarks of the type of good practices which every health care professional aspires to achieve (Nurtley, 2000).
Historically, it has been proved that some social and health service organizations have been deeply involved in services which have denied some patients access to quality healthcare. An infamous example is one of the Tuskegee experiment where poor black men who ere infected with syphilis were only observed and were not treated over a period of years why the white healthcare professionals who were only interested in the study about the disease. This is a good example of extreme cultural destructiveness which involves agencies, program and organizations which actively participated in intentionally attacks against other cultures and dehumanization of their patients who came from different ethnic and racial groups.
Unfortunately, most healthcare professionals all over the world are faced with many obstacles which affect the level of healthcare they are able to provide for their patients. Some of the challenges faced by these healthcare professionals include cultural misunderstanding and miscommunications with their clients (patients) whose experiences, languages and backgrounds are completely different from those of the healthcare providers.
Cultural differences are more sharply drawn in our approaches and definitions of healthy living and health in general. This is because every encounter between a patient and a health care provider is normally a cross cultural experience which should be treated with utmost care. Language in the sociological sense means culture which is the way of life for any human society. Cultural quality healthcare is a non-material culture that deals with the common thoughts, human behaviors and beliefs which bind an ethnic, racial, social or religious group within a community (Nurtley, 2000).
The existence of cultural universals that oppose the tendency of each human society in the development of ethnocentrism, judging other cultures by one’s own standards and seeing one’s standards as being universally true and viewing the other cultures in a negative perspective. This tendency towards ethnocentrism is what has led many communities to deny the reality that most cultures are indeed highly adaptive and therefore can borrow from each other. It is difficult for a patient or client to follow a recommended practice of healthcare if such a practice is in contradi...