Are We Culturally Aware Or Not Nursing Term Paper (Term Paper Sample)

ARE WE CULTURALLY AWARE OR NOT
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Are We Culturally Aware Or Not?
A growing profitable internal medicine practice of 10 physicians, 2 physician assistants, a physical therapist, and a massage therapist is located in a city of 150, people. The clinical personnel are mostly from the majority group in area and consider themselves open-minded, altruistic and culturally aware. The administrative support staff is representative of the makeup of the patient population-mostly minority groups in the local community. The patient population is growing and becoming more diverse from from those newly arrived in the city. The practice is currently facing several challenges.
Question 1.
The practice manager wants to have the local hospital expert on cultural competency come talk to the staff. The administrative support staff does not feel that they need training. How should the practice manager proceed?
Being culturally aware is paramount especially in a diverse community. Both for business and social purposes, one needs to understand what to do and what not to, how, when and where. This is because what applies in one community's culture may not apply to another. For any business transaction success, the key element is trust. Trust can be acquired when one feels accepted in their environment and not threatened. The best approach that the practice manager would have used is first to understand what the administrative support staff liked most and what they disliked. This would help the practice manager know what will be conveyed to them and how. After knowing what they liked, he would pick one of the administrative support staff and include him or her in the team that will talk to them. The person chosen should be the most influential among the group. This will instill trust in them and make them easily accept the training since it will not be hard for the person to convince his group to accept the training despite their feeling that they needed no training, considering that he was the most influential among them, and he understands their culture more than the practice manager. Everyone always gains trust and confidence when one of them represents them at a higher level.
Question 2.
The practice needs to hire a new administrative assistant to work with the front desk staff. The practice wishes to hire someone from the local minority community rather than an equally qualified individual from another state. How should the practice manager proceed? Justify the rationale for this recommendation.
Hiring someone among the local minority communities would be the best choice since it will instill trust among the communities. Having a person from the local minority community will give the community confidence by seeing one of them as a staff. This also will help understand the community more since the personnel will have prior knowledge about the community. That is culture, language and more so what they like and what they don't like, this is because he has lived in the state and understood the communities in and out. Whereas someone from another state will hinder the practice in some ways including the relation of the clients and the staff since the minority communities, make up a population served by the practice. Personnel from another state may fail to understand the cultural practice of the communities as compared to the person from the local community who is one of them. This is because what applies in one community may not apply to another.
Question 3.
With the recent growth, the practice is considering relocating its office to another, larger office facility. Several options are being discussed. Should they relocate to a more affluent area of the city that is less diverse? Or should they stay in the same neighborhood, even if it is less profitable? What are the pros and cons of staying in this neighborhood versus moving to another area? If the rent is higher in the more diverse area, is that enough to justify not moving there? Or is diversity responsiveness a “cost of doing business”? how should the practice manager proceed?
Patient growth to the facility means that the business also is growing at the same rate of the patients' population. Relocating to another area means that they will be going to start afresh both in the organization and the clients' relation. Despite the trust in the patients in the current location, it will be hard for most of them to travel that distance in the name of service; hence they will lose most of their clients. Again, moving will cause time wastage and expenses since they will go and start re-advertising the practice again to the new area. Despite the high rent in the current area, that will not be an adequate reason ...