diversity in healthcare Medicine Assignment

Diversity in Healthcare
Name
Institutional Affiliation
Diversity in Healthcare
In recent years, the development and improvement of healthcare best practices has worked well to transform the way people perceive service delivery in healthcare. As best practices move towards a more individualized form of care that seriously considers the needs of the patient to ensure that they are as comfortable as possible. This is quintessential to high-quality service delivery in healthcare today (Dreachslin, Gilbert, & Malone, 2012). Along the same line, service delivery has been strained by the cultural diversity of patients in the modern clinical setting. The fact that the society is filled with deserving immigrants from all over the world and who have different cultures has made service delivery much more challenging than it needs to be.
It is based on this challenge that the Purnell model of cultural competence in healthcare has become extremely significant in recent years. As physicians, nurses, and healthcare organizations grapple with the challenges of a highly culturally diverse society, this model works well to not only alleviate these issues, but also result in better service delivery (Purnell, 2012). This model allows nurses to understand and appreciate the different cultures their patients come from and not only be respectful of said cultures, but also ensure the cultural values and customs are upheld as much as possible (Sagar, 2011). In this way, it becomes possible for nurses to attend to a diverse populace without compromising quality standards due to language barriers, different cultural norms, or even social etiquette rules.
The Purnell model works well to continually remind nurses of the various cultural domains that vary greatly across cultures and the issues that they encompass. By this measure, it becomes possible to transform nurses into highly skilled, competent, and culturally aware individuals that continually apply the principles of transcultural healthcare in ways that improve service delivery and patient satisfaction in equal measure (Dreachslin et al., 2012). By enlightening nurses on aspects such as language, biological differences, cultural practices and rituals, as well as cultural attitudes towards modern healthcare, this model prepares nurses for all scenarios and prepares them to handle patients from all types of cultures with relative ease.
As far as Purnell’s model goes, there are 12 core domains of culture that influence the cultural practices of individuals. These range from reasons for immigration to attitudes towards work to death and birth rituals and practices as well as cultural perceptions and attitudes towards modern healthcare (Sagar, 2011). For instance, individuals that have emigrated due to violence as refugees will have a vastly differen...