Barriers to Collecting a Health History
In healthcare, cultural competence is the capacity to deliver healthcare services that correspond to social, cultural, and linguistic needs of clients. However, medical staff often face barriers caused by the growing diversity of the American population. While effective communication with patients is the necessary condition for the safety and quality of medical care, healthcare employees face language, cultural, and illiteracy barriers to collecting a comprehensive health history.
The collection of accurate data for a comprehensive health history presupposes the obtainment of information from a patient in the oral and written forms during an interview. When completing a comprehensive health history of a patient, the medical personnel can encounter difficulties with the provision of culturally competent care because of language, culture, and literacy barriers. As a result, the quality of communication between a clinician and a patient may suffer.
The language barrier may interfere with the understanding between patients and healthcare professionals. Patients may consider they have a sufficient level of English, while medical staff may consider they will be able to understand clients without an interpreter . Such presumptions may cause misunderstandings.
The cultural barrier between clinicians and patients may lead to a different understanding of certain words and a different perception of the world . Medical staff are often mistaken thinking that speaking the same language is equal to understanding the cultures of other people.
Finally, clinicians often face challenges related to their patients illiteracy. Patients may fail to provide the information about their health in the written form because they cannot read and write. Moreover, they can be educated, but suffer from poor health literacy . The illiteracy barrier may cause the misinterpretation of medical staff’s instructions by patients.
In conclusion, medical staff may face a range of barriers to effective communication, such as restricted English proficiency, cultural barriers, and poor health literacy. The aforementioned barriers lead to the worsening of the quality of healthcare services because of misunderstandings between patients and clinicians. Therefore, it is necessary to develop and provide culturally and linguistically competent services in the healthcare field. This article was composed by Jon Jones . More my works you can see at this link https://primeessay.org/assistance-in-research-proposal-writing.html and i think that help you
