Cultural Competency Essay

Cultural competency is defined a set of personal and academic skills required for increasing understanding and appreciation of cultural differences. Actually, becoming culturally competent is a developmental process taking lots of time. Cultural competence helps to shape behavioral patents as well as it affects health care delivery. Culturally competent pharmaceutical providers should appreciate family ties and realize that family and behavioral values are determined by peculiarities of culture. Apparently, cultural competence relates to pharmacy, because it suggests pharmaceutical provider-customer relations meaning that health care providers should find individual approach to every patient requiring treatment. The goals of cultural competence are to increase cultural awareness, cultural knowledge, cultural skills and cultural encounters. Cultural differences should be appreciated and accepted and, therefore, it is necessary to seek out new world views of diseases and medicines. Cultural knowledge helps pharmacy to promote better understanding between cultural groups. Cultural competence promotes assessing patient without relying only on written facts. It means that there is a need to find another perspective, to reduce resistance and defensiveness and to acknowledge interactive mistakes. Pharmacy suggests meeting and working directly with people of different cultures and, thus, developing cultural competency helps to dispel stereotypes and to contradict academic knowledge. Pharmacy requires gathering cultural knowledge which is often neglected. Cultural competency welcomes cooperation and collaboration instead of insulting other culture’s perspectives. For example, physicians belong to cultural group possessing their own beliefs, customs, practices and rituals. This includes definitions of illness and health, systematic approaches, compliance, prevention through annual exams, the superiority of technology, etc. Therefore, cultural competency plays crucial role in medicine. Works Cited Spector, R. Cultural Diversity in Health and Illness. Stamford, CT: Appleton & Lange, 1996.