Cultural Competence In Intercultural Communication

As technology advances, people are now able to instantly communicate with people around the world in seconds. Our communities, that were once culturally isolated or being very homogeneous in character, are now becoming more culturally and ethnically diverse. While this change can be beneficial for a society, it can also present a wide variety of challenges that can impede communication and understanding. For nurses, it is especially important that they have cultural competence. Cultural competence is best described as “the integration ok knowledge, attitudes, and skills that enhance cross-cultural communication and appropriate interactions with others” (Black, 346). If there is a failure to have cultural competency then that can lead to miscommunication, misunderstanding and mistrust which could be detrimental to the patient’s health and wellbeing. I interviewed Nelia Floyd, who is one of my classmates at the University of North Dakota. Nelia was born and raised in La Ceiba, a city in northern Honduras, where the majority of her family still resides. She and her husband and their one child recently moved to the United States when her husband was transferred from a base in Honduras to the Grand Forks Air Force Base. She is 34 years old and is currently pursuing a …show more content…
According to the article “Between resistance and co-optation: the politics of education in the Honduran crisis,” the author discusses the challenges that many young children face when trying to get a good education. The author writes,
For years, the Honduran education system has ranked among the worst, in the Americas. It suffers from low-quality teaching, frequent strikes, inadequate resources, over-centralization, and partisan teacher selection. The political crisis triggered by the coup d’état on June 28, [2009] took a massive toll on an already weak education system. (Altschuler,