CARING ACROSS CULTURES
DR. M. KAMALINI KUMAR PhD. RN.
Practices and beliefs that center around illness, suffering, death and bereavement in patients from various ethnic backgrounds and belief systems can create many challenges for health care professionals. These beliefs also influence the way patients perceive the quality of care they receive. Research has shown that caregivers who are sensitive to the cultural and belief systems of patients can help not only to reduce their stress, but increase the compliance and satisfaction with the care they receive. Besides this obvious understanding of culture, there is the culture of the times we now live in. Which culture should we address and engage in? The traditional values of Christianity and the church or the contemporary culture of social reform, less binding commitments and sexual freedom of all kinds? We must grapple with these issues with wisdom and insight.
Knowing and remembering every person's cultural practices is a virtual impossibility, but understanding human relationships and connectedness is not. This seminar will explore the simple, but profound ways in which relationship-based care crosses cultural barriers in ways that transcend any strategy or program that ensures culturally competent care. It is based on the fact that God who created diversity has a culture that supersedes all other cultures. The practice of "God's culture" is what brings unity to our diversity and power to our caring. To quote Rachel Naomi Remen "Fixing and helping create a distance between people, but we cannot serve at a distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected."
The goal of this seminar is to go beyond just knowledge of a person's culture in order to care for them, but to grasp the significance of care that is delivered not with professionalism alone but with the mystery of relational and incarnational living.