Culture and Health

Many things can affect someone’s health status. In class we have learned that socioeconomic status, lifestyle choices, access to care, and trust within the healthcare system can all play a role. I also believe that one’s culture can play a very large role. In nursing school, we focus a lot on community health. In this course we look at how many different determinants can affect one’s health and one very important thing that we focus on is culture. For example, we worked with rural Latino families. This group suffers greatly from chronic diabetes. When we talked more in depth with this group we found that food plays a large role in their culture. Many people explained that often people gather to celebrate and meet and food is a central part of this. They often feel that they can’t turn down food that someone else has prepared for them because it would be rude, even though they know it is not good for their diabetes or other health conditions. It is not that they don’t understand their own condition; it is just that other things, such as culture, can play a greater role on one’s health. From a healthcare perspective, it would be important to know these things about the Latino culture in order to put a plan in place that would be more specific and beneficial to a Latino diabetes patient. Of course we must also look at access and SES, but without understanding the social importance of food in this culture, any education or treatments would probably not be very beneficial.
In nursing school we are taught to be culturally competent nurses and I think that this is a very important concept. According to one of my nursing textbooks, Fundamentals of Nursing, culturally competent care is “the ability of a nurse to bridge culture gaps in caring, work with cultural differences, and enable clients and families to achieve meaningful and supportive caring.”
Each culture looks at health and illness in very different ways. Everyone approaches healthcare differently. These differences can range from causes of disease, methods of diagnosis, treatment, healers, practitioners, and caring patterns. In order to completely understand a patient and their illness, I believe that it is important to first look at the culture that they take part in. As we talked about in lecture, it would be important to look at their habitus, but more importantly, we need to talk to the person in an open and understanding manner so that we can understand more about the culture that they come from. We cannot just make assumptions based off of what we see. These concepts have become very important to me and the nurse that I will be.