Cultural Sensibility in Healthcare: A Personal & Professional Guidebook

Book excerpt: The healthcare workforce and landscape continues to evolve with the ongoing education systems forming in foreign countries and immigration and foreign employment continuing to grow in the United States. Every heath care provider and patient is challenged with cultural competency and acceptance on a daily basis. Often times our own prejudices and beliefs have great potential to interfere with effective health care interactions when what is truly important is providing the best patient care possible. There is much discussion around cultural sensitivity and cultural expertise, but now the discussion has shifted to cultural sensibility, which is a deliberate behavior that proactively provides an enriched provider consumer/patient interaction, where the health care provider acknowledges cultural issues and situations through thoughtful reasoning, responsiveness, and discreet (attentive, considerate, and observant) interactions. In this highly practical and informative handbook, author Sally Ellis Fletcher offers healthcare providers a process that encourages them to first consider their own attitudes, biases, beliefs, and prejudices through self-reflection. Cultural Sensibility in Healthcare challenges readers to examine cultural issues beyond just theory and to instead explore culture as it affects your professional role thus creating culturally sensibility health care encounters.