Week 5 Project Managing Healthcare Work Force

HEALTHCARE MULTILINGUAL AND BICULTURAL CHALLENGES 5

Multilingual and Bicultural Challenges in Healthcare

Angelica F Davis

South University Online

HCM3046 Managing the Healthcare Workforce

Week 3 Project

Dr. Vincent Bulzoni

03/08/2021

Multilingual and Bicultural Challenges in Healthcare

Multilingual and bicultural challenges extensively affect the healthcare environment. Whereas diversity has been celebrated in the healthcare field, it is undoubtedly a challenge that leads to inequality between different ethnic, language, and racial minorities. Some of the outstanding multicultural and bilingual issues that make healthcare services hard are poverty, lifestyle, and literacy issues. These three pose a challenge to providing medical care among the concerned populations in an instrumental manner. This essay considers how they cause inequality in the United States, lead to undesirable healthcare outcomes, and the necessity of addressing them. Besides, the article appreciates increased surveillance, customization of services, and additional awareness of disparities that affect healthcare as some of the approaches applicable in addressing the identified challenges. Ultimately, poverty, unhealthy lifestyle, and illiteracy are bilingual and multicultural issues that negatively affect healthcare in the United States and require requisite redress.

Contextually, poverty presents as a cultural issue in the United States, whose likely effect is weakened healthcare outcomes. Considering the growing global chronic disease epidemic, Cohn (2007) indicated that people in developing countries are more susceptible to chronic diseases such as diabetes than those in developed nations. Besides, the author found that the spread of such diseases weakens national economies and family incomes. Therefore, poverty is an articulate issue in healthcare. It creates inaccessibility to healthcare than is the case among societies that are more economically advanced.

Other than poverty, another aspect that manifests to showcase multilingualism is an unhealthy lifestyle. Regardless of language and cultural differences, growing support for unhealthy lifestyles is undeniably on the rise. Developing nations, for instance, are adopting unhealthy lifestyles from developed ones (Cohn, 2007). According to the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute (2004), lack of cultural competence, for instance, knowledge about healthy lifestyles across cultures, has been a leading factor in presenting a problem for the healthcare environment and needs to be fixed.

Moreover, illiteracy cannot be overlooked as a leading challenge in healthcare. Essentially, dealing with patients is a challenging encounter. However, it is harder for medical officers to work with clients who cannot effectively express themselves. Wildly where people from different social and economic classes coexist, literacy is needed to realize effective outcomes. Putsch & Joyce (n.d.) indicate that low literacy levels weaken cross-cultural care. Research also proves that low literacy negatively affects access to quality healthcare based on doctor communication and in following up prescriptions and doctor's directives (Georgetown University Health Policy Institute, 2004). Though not constructed on language or cultural grounds, this issue has an affiliation to both, and it is a challenge to the provision of quality healthcare.

As a redress, there is a need for increased medically related surveillance in different localities. Whereas health remains a private concern, enhancing leadership can help create awareness of poverty levels, literacy levels, and the concerned population's lifestyle traits (Roush, 2011). With this understanding, creating customized service delivery to clients will be easy. Underlying support for this position is that the healthcare fraternity will be more informed about how informed the people they serve are and their acceptance of the medical directives. Lastly, creating awareness regarding how these disparities negatively affect healthcare outcomes will be necessary as a solution. As identified in the research, illiteracy of lack of accurate information is a catalyst for poor health outcomes; therefore, the population is aware of how the identified challenges negatively affect health delivery to achieve better results.

Health is a field faced by many social challenges that span around multilingualism and biculturalism. Illiteracy, poverty, and unhealthy lifestyles are some of the issues that threaten effective healthcare. These issues surround ethnic and cultural constructions, and in their ways, lead to a weak healthcare environment. Through surveillance, their redress through leadership, customization of services for every client, and increased awareness of how they threaten positive healthcare outcomes will be practical approaches. Across societies, language, and cultures, these approaches, altogether, will influence positive changes that will lead to better health outcomes in such an unprecedented way as they will counter the negative influence.

References

Cohn, D. (2007, May 17). The growing global chronic disease epidemic. Retrieved from: http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2007/GrowingGlobalChronicDiseaseEpidemic.aspx

Georgetown University Health Policy Institute. (2004). Cultural competence in health care: Is it important for people with chronic conditions? Retrieved from https://hpi.georgetown.edu/agingsociety/pubhtml/cultural/cultural.html

Putsch, R., & Joyce, M. (n.d.). Dealing with Patients from Other Cultures: Methodology in Cross-cultural Care. 229, 1050–1065. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK340/pdf/Bookshelf_NBK340.pdf

Roush, S. (2011). Chapter 19: Enhancing surveillance. In VPD surveillance manual (5th ed.). Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/surv-manual/chpt19-enhancing-surv.pdf