Effective Coping: The Role Of Diversity In Health Care

As health care professionals, in order to most effectively work with our clients of increasingly diverse backgrounds, we must commit to move towards an “educational mission that embraces educating to end oppression and for social justice” (Wallace, 2000a, p. 1087). In order to move in this direction, we must appreciate the impact of our own actions on our clients. Wallace (2000b) aptly points out that, as professionals, we may “actually engage in invisible, covert forms of violence” should we inadvertently project “negative and low expectations on clients” or talk to them in a way that implies they are inferior and that we are superior (p. 131). While unintentional, these behaviors carry consequences that can be harmful to our clients and

Therefore, in order to improve our effectiveness we must confront our own adaptive affective, behavioral, and cognitive coping responses to diversity and multicultural populations. As noted by Wallace (2005), adaptive affective coping refers to the concept of identifying and focusing on the positive attributes and strengths of a client, while “having positive expectations about this clients ability to change” and sustain the change behaviors over time (p. 144). A critical component of interactions is empathy, which is defined as an emotional state reached by using one’s own potential to feel in order to appreciate a client’s inner emotional experience, and it likely is the most significant factor related to the success of treatment. In addition to displaying empathy, it is important that counselors demonstrate respect, which is an affective state experienced as a consequence of “acknowledgement of another’s experience as valid, real, and worthy of recognition” (p. 147). Once respect is established, it opens the possibility for acceptance. Acceptance is defined as an affective state that results from appreciating a person’s current situation, “what’s going on with the person, and the nature of the person’s experience” (p.148). An important aspect of acceptance is remaining free from negative judgment, criticism, and disapproval of the person’s emotions and behaviors, values,

The concept of culturally and linguistically appropriate services may be defined broadly as those that are “respectful of and responsive to the cultural and linguistic needs of all individuals” (USDHSS, 2013, p. 9). In an attempt to minimize racial and ethnic healthcare disparities, the Office of Minority Health at the U.S Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS) revised or enhanced The National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS). The executive summary of the USDHHS notes that “lack of culturally and linguistically appropriate services” is one of the most modifiable factors contributing to health inequities (USDHSS, 2013, p. 8). The original standards were developed in 2000 and were more recently updated to take into consideration the increasing diversity in the U.S., to account for developments in the fields of cultural and linguistic competence, and assure pertinence in light of policy changes that occurred over that