Enhancing Patient-Centered Care in Diverse Communities

1. Understanding Culture and the Cultural Continuum

This chapter defines culture, cultural competence, and the stages of the cultural continuum. It explains common cultural challenges affecting families receiving pediatric PT and OT. It describes culture as communication, and communication as culture in the broadest sense.

2. How Cultural Beliefs, Attitudes, and Behaviors May Impact Your Understanding of the Patient Perspective

This chapter discusses how cultural beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors impact patient-centered care. Issues of ethnocentrism are contrasted with cultural pluralism. Changes in the demographics of the USA are explained, and the need for developing culturally competent care is summarized.

3. High-Context and Low-Context Cultural Assumptions With Collectivistic and Individualistic Value Orientations in Diverse Communities

This chapter discusses the concepts of high-context and low-context cultural assumptions and compares them with collectivistic and individualistic value assumptions. The chapter provides tools for bridging cross-cultural differences. The importance of clinicians understanding Kleinman’s explanatory model and Kleinman’s Eight Questions is described.

4. Tools for Bridging Cross-Cultural Differences

This chapter reviews the NLP (neurolinguistic psychology) skill of rapport building when working with medical translators during interviews with families in diverse communities. By matching the body language of the family spokesperson while listening to the translator, the clinician can establish rapport nonverbally with the family spokesperson while actively listening to the translator.