Cultural Competency in Healthcare Organizations
Culture refers to a framework that directs the way societal members behave and interpret other people’s behaviors (Rose, 2013). Culture provides us with guidelines on how to interact, how to solve conflicts, and how to express ourselves. In a health care context, culture impacts the way people experience illness, express illness, pain, and how people make health care decisions (Ihara, 2004). Cultural competence in health care is the ability of organizations and providers to integrate factors such as ethnicity, race, language, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, physical and mental ability, occupation, and socioeconomic status into the provision and structure of health care system (Rose, 2013). As such, culturally competent health services aim at providing a high quality of care services to patients regardless of their…