The past 2 decades have witnessed a sharp increase in the global migration of health care providers, along with an increasingly diverse patient population. Since culture fundamentally influences all healthrelated behaviors, an understanding of patient perspectives, values, beliefs, and approaches to health and well-being is critical to ensuring the best possible health outcomes. In addition, pr...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present teaching strategies to enhance students’ cultural competence in non educational settings. Methods: Utilizing Purnell’s cultural competence model and Lattanzi’s cultural ladder the authors describe teaching strategies used to promote students’ understanding of the complex nature of culture and how the multiple layers of culture influence the healt...

As a result of profound worldwide demographic change, physicians will increasingly care for patients from cultural backgrounds other than their own. Differences in beliefs, values, and traditional health care practices are of particular relevance at the end of life. Health care providers and patients and families may not have shared understandings of the meaning of illness or death and may not ...

The growing national racial and ethnic diversity has created a greater need for health care delivery systems and health care providers to be more responsive to unique patient needs, that goes beyond meeting the immediate health problems to include attention to other critical component of patient care that take into account cultural competency such as health literacy, health beliefs and behavior...

Cultural issues affect patients’, families’, and providers’ perspectives on health, illness, and disease, thus a provider’s sensitivity and awareness to cultural issues can influence the quality and outcome of the patient and family encounter. As the population of the United States becomes more culturally diverse, health care professionals render care to patients whose cultural beliefs, values,...

Korea is becoming a multi-cultural society. The Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Gender Equality and the Family play central roles in creating policies to support marriage-based immigrants. Various services, including Korean language and culture, have been provided through Multi-Cultural Family Support Centres based on the ‘Multi-cultural Families Support Act’. However, health care polic...

Telepsychiatry may involve working with clinicians, patients and systems of care that are both geographically and culturally distinct. In this context, culturally appropriate care is an important component of telepsychiatry. The outline for cultural formulation from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) provides general principles for addressing these issues. Two co...

Culture fundamentally shapes how individuals make meaning out of illness, suffering, and dying. With increasing diversity in the United States, encounters between patients and physicians of different backgrounds are becoming more common. Thus the risk for cross-cultural misunderstandings surrounding care at the end of life is also increasing. Studies have shown cultural differences in attitudes...

OBJECTIVES The provision of supportive and palliative care for an indigenous people in Nova Scotia, Canada, was examined to further our understanding and thereby improve cultural competency. Most of Nova Scotia's indigenous people are Mi'kmaq. The Mi'kmaq Nation lives in Atlantic Canada as well as New England in the eastern USA. METHODS Themes were identified in the literature and through dis...