Cultural Awareness In Health And Social Care

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Cultural safety is derived from inequalities for Maori; therefore, it has been developed since late 1980 due to some issues around Maori health. In the 1990, the Council amended its standard to incorporate cultural safety into its curriculum assessment process (Richardson & MacGibbon, 2001). In addition, people who work in the health centre need to deal with the patients from many different countries, which lead the societies to become multicultural; therefore, cultural competence has been addressed that can help doctors or nurses to prepare themselves before they meet the patients with a variety of ethnic backgrounds (Flowers, 2004). In this essay, it will outline the definitions and models of cultural safety and cultural competence and explain …show more content…

They claim that the main components of it are cultural awareness, cultural knowledge, cultural skill, cultural encounter and cultural desire in order to develop outcomes. Cultural awareness is exploring one’s cultural background. Cultural knowledge is a process of finding and obtaining information in terms of diseases and treatments in a variety of ethnic groups. Cultural skill is the ability to collect relevant cultural data about the patients. Cultural encounter is a process that encourages the nurses to engage in cross-cultural interactions with the patients. Cultural desire is the motivation of the health care providers to engage in the process of becoming culturally aware and knowledgeable. While they claim that there are five components of the models, Seeleman, Suurmond and Stronks (2009) and the Medical Council of New Zealand (2006) show a different view on it. They state that cultural competence consists of three concepts, which are cultural knowledge, cultural attitudes and cultural skills, which are important for medical practice with a culturally diverse …show more content…

When I started my volunteer works in the New Zealand nursing home, I found myself having difficulties in communicating with elderly people. A way that they communicated with me was very various. Some people used their body language to say their expression; however, I could not understand what they were talking about so I could not provide the best services. If I knew that I needed to develop the ability of giving information in the way that they communicated, I could give them more pleasant services. Therefore, I think that this component will be useful and assist me to provide proper services to the patients as a nurse is a person who encounters patients with many different

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