Cultural Competency Among Latinos

Cultural Competency is a major issue that we face today when dealing with diverse groups and this may be because there are not enough resources to deal with these issues. Latinos most especially is one of the fastest growing groups in the United States today, but these groups are not getting the resources that they need. Some of the issues that these groups face is acculturation, language barrier, parent-adolescent conflict that may lead to the Latino girls committing suicide and maltreatment. Social worker need to be careful when working with this group or any other group and take into consideration their traditional values, culture and believe when working with this group because with every group their traditional values, cultures and beliefs …show more content…
Upon all these health care is a major issue that these people face. Snyder, L. L. (2008) states “Latinos have a greater lack of access to health insurance, health promotion, prevention programs, and suffer disproportionately from certain health diseases, injury, disability and death.” Most of the reason that they go through this is because they do not know how to get the help they need and some even if they know how, they do not know how to communicate their needs because of the language barrier. Culture also plays a role in Latinos not getting the proper care that they need because “respeto(respect), personalismo and confianza (personal contact and trust), familia(family), fatalismo(fatalism), time orientation and faith, spirit and body.” Every diverse group has their own way that they show respect. Some culture not showing eye contact when a person is a sign of showing respect and some culture is a sign of disrespect. In the Latino culture as well as African culture not looking a person in the eye when they are talking is a sign of respect. These people also believe in living in the present and letting whatever happens happen because everything happens for a reason and nothing is within our control. Religion also plays an important role in their lives and they try to live their live accordingly. So a way to help this group is to try to work with other Latino community-based organization, conduct a focus group, have a way to communicate with this group so that they know what is going even if it include having an interpreter, and also have a way to test the result to make sure that this program will