Culturally Competent Care for African Americans
Majority of the African Americans experience health care disparities due to inadequate health insurance coverage and limited access to health care services. When people have this kind of limitations, it is essential to be culturally competent to ensure they receive quality care. I would recommend health care providers to raise their cultural awareness, cultural skill, and cultural knowledge to encourage culturally competent care for African Americans.
Cultural awareness can enable health care providers to have exploration and self-examination of stereotypes, and prejudices that they have against African Americans. For instance, while English is the dominant language spoken in America, some African Americans speak African American English (AAE). The main challenge is that most AAE speakers are discriminated because they believed that they are less educated. Nurses with such biases may lead to unequal treatment (Ritter & Graham, 2017). Therefore nurses need to examine their construct of cultural awareness.
Health care providers can enrich their cultural skill to enhance their ability to perform physical assessments in a culturally sensitive way. Cultural assessment is essential to health care in that it allows patients to explain their illness. With practical, cultural skill, a nurse can have answers to questions such as ”how alterations in skin colour predict?” For instance, deviation from the healthy skin of African Americans to alterations such as yellowing of the skin may be a sign of jaundice.
Institutions training health providers can offer their trainees with cultural knowledge. In acquiring this knowledge, the training can focus on incorporating issues such as healthcare-related beliefs (Abbott, 2015). The reason is that most African Americans are very spiritual, and they consider God as the source of their health. With this kind of knowledge, health care providers can appreciate the role of religious beliefs in offering comfort and support to provide the African Americans with treatment that accommodates their ideas.
References
Abbott, L. S. (2015). Evaluation of nursing interventions designed to impact knowledge, behaviours, and health outcomes for rural African-Americans: An integrative review. Public Health Nursing, 32(5), 408-420. doi:10.1111/phn.12174
Ritter, L. A., & Graham, D. H. (2017). Multicultural health. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.