Cultural Competence

Zhang, Bin Lauren Arenson Ph.D. Humanities 2 Medical Anthropology 21Jan2013 Importance of Understanding Cultural Competence Cultural competence is not a new concept for me because I have been working as a phlebotomist at the hospital since 2008. As a phlebotomist, obviously my main role is to interact with different people to withdraw blood sample by venipuncture. Even I was trained to be a professional, polite, and cultural understanding health care provider, I still feel that it 's so difficult to talk with certain patients, especial dealing with patient who has little English background. Sometimes they get offended easily if I unintentionally pronounce their name wrong . I had no choices but to ask my superiors to apologize to the patients for me . After I took cultural competence self-assessment test yesterday, I realized that I didn 't grasp the full meaning of the notion culture competence. There are still some areas I need to improve in order to provide best patient care and avoid conflicts at the hospital. First area of cultural competence I need to work on is my communication styles. Sometimes I ignore the patients who has limited ability to speak English. As a routine procedure, I usually collect the paper that patient was asked to sign and briefly explain the procedure because I expect they already know everything. As I read first chapter of Galanti 's book, I know why sometimes the patients would give me a bad

Cited: Arneson Richard, "Egalitarianism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2002.) Geri-Ann Galanti, Caring For Patients From Different Cultures Rosales, José María. "Liberalism, Civic Reformism and Democracy." 20th World Contress on Philosophy: Political Philosophy