CULTURAL COMPETENCE OF HEALTH CARE WORKERS: A STUDY OF SASARAM/BIHAR

Abstract

The socio-cultural diversity within our society poses challenges for the healthcare professional to ensure the quality of health care services. Addressing the cultural competencies of the health care professional is the strategic approach to improve the quality and effectiveness of the health care services for socially and culturally diverse groups. Cultural competence is the ability of the professional to recognize, appreciate, and respect the values, preferences, and expressed needs of patients seeking health care services under their care. In Rural health care settings, the ethnics and cultural differences based on caste, class and gender create severe challenges for the health care professional to address the expectation and needs of the patients which leads to miscommunication and dissatisfaction among the patients which even challenges the ethical values of the health care professionals. Therefore cultural competence has to be integrated into health care practices very effectively. Evidence from various studies showcases that cultural competence training of the health care professional is quite effective in promoting the knowledge, attitudes, skills of the profession on cultural sensitiveness and practices which can be effective in fulfilling the goal of health for all. Therefore this study emphasized understanding the issues associated with the cultural competence of the healthcare professional in rural healthcare settings by outlining the concept of the cultural competence from rural healthcare settings and by exploring the existing consequence of deficiencies in cultural aspects in health care. It is evident from the study that many staff engaged in the rural health care setting recognise the importance of the issues and opinion that the issues must be addressed so that the health practices can be enhanced. Based on the opinion of the respondents finally through the study effort has been made to propose the possible social work intervention to address the issues and promote cultural competencies among the health care professionals. The social work intervention focused on intensive training on cultural competence and cross-cultural issues for health professionals and ensuring multidomain teams work so that the cultural barrier can be overcome effectively.