Scholarly Article Summary: Cultural Competence

Cultural competent care, allows healthcare providers to create a rapport with patients from different backgrounds and give services that align with their cultural needs (Flowers, 2004). The skills allow the nurses to make the right assessment to the patients and facilitate appropriate treatment. From the article, there are significant disparities in health care, and health status exists between the Alaska Native and American Indian veterans and other groups. AI/AN veterans mostly reside in rural areas. In this case, about 40% of these veterans live on tribal lands and reservations that are geographically dispersed. These areas are often isolated and remote which explains the significant challenge in healthcare delivery (Noe, Kaufman, Kaufmann, Brooks, & Shore, 2014). Alaska Native and American Indian veterans exhibit poor ranking on various outstanding quality of life dimensions such as home ownership, employment, income and educational attainment. In addition to challenges of transportation and care distance, these veterans experience some other barriers related to access like lack of specialty care and appropriate diagnostic services.

The study applied an exploratory research technique, with the aim of determining the organizational features that predict the cultural competent services provision. The study focused on the health facilities under the VA (Veterans Affairs) Department, majoring on the AI (Native American) and AN (Alaska Native) veterans. This research employed ORCA (Organizational Readiness to Change Assessment) for surveying 27 Western Region Veterans Affairs facilities (Noe et al., 2014). This method allowed for easy assessing of organizational readiness as well as the ability for adopting and implementing native-specific services. ORCA also allowed for profiling the availability of American Indian and Alaska Native programs of veteran and resources for similar programs.

The subscales of ORCA statistically were used to explain whether the staff of Veterans Affairs understood that their facilities ability to meet the AI/AN veterans healthcare needs. Some of these subscales included Leader's Practices, Program Needs, and communication. Conversely, all predicted lower native-specific services implementation. The study's findings might help to develop ways to adopt and implement promising native-specific programs as well as AI/AN veterans services, and which can be generalized for other groups of veterans (Noe et al., 2014). Admitting more assessment is required, these preparatory outcomes may give essential direction to encouraging selection and execution of Native-Specific projects, and administrations focused on AI/AN veterans. Recognizing offices with these hierarchical attributes might be fundamental to practical usage of new native specific projects and could give understanding into the probability of fruitful execution at a specific site before the intervention of assets or enable fitting of an execution intercession to the particular needs of partaking destinations (Noe et al., 2014). What's more, trying to construct the limit of associations on these key measures might be an essential technique for creating official status to embrace native specific projects and practices effectively.

Executing organizational change models that have been appeared to be compelling through past research and concentrating those models on mission definition, staff objectives, and execution assessment might be a helpful system. The LGBT community is one of the underserved population in the healthcare system that needs to be considered. In the USA approximately nine people fall in the LGBT category (Butler, McCreedy, & Schwer, 2016). The ORCA can be applied to this underserved population to ensure their health need are covered appropriately. Healthcare organization needs to have policies and attitudes that are cultural responsive especially those working in multicultural environments (Guerrero, 2012). The dynamics in meeting cultural sensitive needs should be an ongoing process.

In spite of the fact that the discoveries did not bolster our theory that higher scores on the ORCA measures would be related to more noteworthy usage of projects and practices for AI/A veterans, the scores for the review things identified with administrations for AI/A veterans recommend essential contemplations for development. For instance, with, just 42% of respondents demonstrated that their offices had ventures that planned to build up strong associations and sharing understandings to profit AI/A veterans.

References

Butler, M., McCreedy, E., & Schwer, N. (2016). Improving cultural competence to reduce health disparities [Internet]. Rockville (MD): Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US).

Flowers, D. L. (2004). Culturally competent nursing care a challenge for the 21st century. Critical Care Nurse, 24(4), 48-52.

Guerrero, E. G. (2012). Organizational characteristics that foster early adoption of cultural and linguistic competence in outpatient substance abuse treatment in the United States. Evaluation and program planning, 35(1), 9-15

Noe, T. D., Kaufman, C. E., Kaufmann, L. J., Brooks, E., & Shore, J. H. (2014). Providing culturally competent services for American Indian and Alaska Native veterans to reducehealth care disparities. American journal of public health, 104(S4), S548-S554.