Week 1 cultural diversity

Introduction

Today, many societies extended to include diverse cultures. Cultural diversity is a motive for health practitioners to enrich their cultural knowledge and achieve cultural competency in order to optimize the quality of health offered to patients (Mareno and Hart, 2014). This essay is a reflection on how week 1 assisted me in gaining a better understanding on culture.

Body

I used to link cultural identity to the person’s geographical origin, ethnicity and religion.  After developing a deep knowledge on the definition of culture, I understood that it results from the experiences that people encounter and are linked to the group by whom they are surrounded (Fiske, 2017). I also found that Lalita Tembang and Monique Alker share with me the same finding. Thus, I understand now the ambiguity of supposing to understand a person’s values and belief by presuming his/her belonging to a culture based on certain parameters that we rendered it into stereotypes. For example, I come from an Arab Islamic background which may mislead others into presuming that I undermine women’s capabilities and rights. However, a culturally competent person would not allow religion nor ethnicity to solely define my culture or my values and beliefs. Then, by taking my life experiences and my social group into consideration, the same person may my values and belief to support equality and judgment of other people’s capabilities beyond their gender.

Conclusion

Thanks to the activities of week 1, I think that my deeper understanding about knowledge will help me in my future practice in nursing in communicating and delivering healthcare to people from diverse cultures by understanding them as individual’s instead of presuming their cultural values and beliefs based geographical origin, ethnicity and religion.

References

FISKE, S. T. 2017. Prejudices in Cultural Contexts: Shared Stereotypes (Gender, Age) Versus Variable Stereotypes (Race, Ethnicity, Religion). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12, 791-799.

MARENO, N. & HART, P. L. 2014. Cultural Competency Among Nurses with Undergraduate and Graduate Degrees: Implications for Nursing Education. Nursing Education Perspectives, 35, 83-8.

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