Impact Of Culture On Public Health

Culture is an extremely important aspect in people’s daily lives and effects everyone, from healthcare professionals to the patients they treat. Culture plays an important role and impacts public health very much because it is ingrained in every society, and because of that it vastly differs from society to society and person to person. It is an extremely important aspect to pay attention to especially in the public health field where one is exposed to many different people and therefore many different cultures.

Culture

Culture is defined as, “the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts” (Zimmermann, 2017). Furthermore, it can be defined as having a shared set of behavior patterns and interactions, as a kind of “group identity”. Culture includes having a complex learned set of perceptions as well, which range from person to person given their backgrounds.

Elements that make up a person’s culture include social organization, such as social classes and family patterns, customs and traditions which are typically a set of rules of

In the case of one study conducted on Korean immigrants it was found that Korean immigrants do not purchase healthcare insurance, and that culture was the pinpoint explanation for this phenomenon. Culture is often the case of health disparities or detriments because it varies so immeasurably. According to Fiscella and Sanders (2016), there has been disparities in healthcare coverage among ethnic racial groups as well as native-born Americans and immigrants. The study noted that other studies have found and pinpointed culture as the underlying cause that affected health disparities among racial, ethnic, cultural groups especially when they could not be explained by socioeconomic factors or by the demographic (Choi and Nguyen