Cultural Humility in Healthcare ________________________________________________________________
Healthcare Professional Consideration A culturally humble healthcare professional needs to be able to provide services that transcend culture, ability, LGBTQ status, and class, as well as integrate healthcare professional-stated cultural and other considerations into treatment. Moreover, the healthcare professional must rec- ognize the roles that power, privilege, and oppression play in both the counseling relationship and the experiences of patients (Sue & Sue, 2021). Self-Assessment Question 1. Which of the following statements pertains to the definition of cultural humility? A) Healthcare professionals must learn a quantifiable set of attitudes. B) Cultural humility is an ongoing process. C) Cultural humility is a skill that can be taught. D) Healthcare professionals know that there is an end point to cultural humility.
INTRODUCTION Cultural humility in healthcare is increasingly recognized as essential for delivering equitable and effective patient care. Unlike cultural competency, which focuses on acquiring knowl- edge about different cultures, cultural humility emphasizes self-reflection, lifelong learning, and addressing systemic power imbalances. This approach is particularly crucial as the U.S. becomes more diverse, with minority populations projected to become the majority by 2045 (Kibakaya and Oyeku, 2022). T DEFINITION OF CULTURAL HUMILITY In the context of healthcare services, cultural humility is defined as “a process of being aware of how people’s culture can impact their health behaviors and, in turn, using this awareness to cultivate sensitive approaches in treating patients” (So et al., 2024). In contrast, cultural competency is described as ensuring that healthcare professionals learn a quantifiable set of attitudes that allow them to work effectively within the cultural context of each patient. There is an end point to cultural competency. It ends with the termination of the healthcare professional-patient relationship. On the other hand, cultural humility is an ongoing process, which requires continual self-reflection and self-critique. Cultural humility is a prerequisite to cultural competency. It forms a basis for effective, harmonious healthcare professional-patient relation- ships (So et al., 2024). Cultural humility involves entering into a professional relation- ship with a patient by honoring the patient’s beliefs, customs, and values. Cultural competency is described as a skill that can be taught, trained, and achieved. This approach is based on the concept that the greater the knowledge a healthcare professional has about another culture, the greater the com- petence in practice. Cultural humility de-emphasizes cultural knowledge and competency and focuses on lifelong nurturing of self-reflection and self-critique, promotion of interpersonal sensitivity, addressing power imbalances, and promoting the appreciation of intracultural variation and individuality (Stubbe, 2020). This humility exemplifies respect for human dignity. An important part of cultural humility is identifying one’s own biases, self-understanding, and interpersonal sensitivity. It is important that healthcare professionals nurture an apprecia- tion for the many facets of each patient, including culture, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual identity, and lifestyle. According to Okoniewski (2022), healthcare professionals need both process (cultural humility) and product (cultural competence) to effectively provide care and interact with a culturally diverse society.
DIMENSIONS OF DIVERSITY IN THE UNITED STATES
DEFINITIONS Diversity is a multidimensional concept that refers to many aspects of an individual that combine to comprise an overall sense of self. Moreover, diversity occurs within a cultural and social context where variances within the general population are treated differentially based on the social, political, and cultural constructs existing within a society. Some dimensions of diversity include race, socioeconomic class, gender, sexual orientation (i.e., identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer/ questioning [LGBQ]), gender identification (i.e., identifying as transgender), and disability. Although this is not an exhaustive list of all elements of individual diversity, it does address many prominent dimensions of diversity an individual may have as well as determine where that individual falls within the soci- etal hierarchy. Dimensions of diversity also serve to privilege and empower some members of society while oppressing and marginalizing other members of society (Sue & Sue, 2021). Intersectionality is a concept that is used to describe how these various dimensions come together to privilege or oppress indi- viduals and groups of individuals. Intersectionality is defined as multiple, intersecting identities and ascribed social positions (e.g., race, gender, sexual identity, class) along with associated power dynamics, as people are at the same time members of many different social groups and have unique experiences with privilege and disadvantage because of those intersections (Kuran et al., 2020).
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