Posted: March 27th, 2015

Cultural Competency

Cultural Competency

Second Essay Assignment: The Social Sciences and Healthcare Humanities

Follow the Guidelines for Humanities Essays and write a 4 page essay on one of the topics below. The resources for this assignment include The Medicalization of Society, Dancing Skeletons, and handouts on Concepts of Disease and Illness, Definitions of Culture, and Cultural Competency. Earlier class materials may also remain relevant. You are not expected to incorporate all of these sources in your essay, but you should make use of sufficient course materials to create context, establish purpose, address course objectives, and fully develop your theme. You must make extensive use Dancing Skeletons (topic two.

1.    Cultural Competency

The University definition of cultural competency includes the ability to: “effectively and comfortably communicate across cultures with patients of differing backgrounds, taking into account aspects of trust in order to adopt mutually acceptable objectives and measures.” Dancing Skeletons describes how anthropologists seek knowledge of other cultures and how cross-cultural understanding is a foundation for health interventions at both interpersonal and public health/public policy levels. Write an essay that discusses how this anthropological study illuminates barriers to cross-cultural understanding and contributes to cultural competency in healthcare.
Dancing Skeleton Book must be used as well as the other links and the documents provided.
Quotes and evidences have to be used in order to support the paper.

http://anthro.palomar.edu/culture/culture_1.htm

http://www.tamu.edu/faculty/choudhury/culture.html

http://www.carla.umn.edu/culture/definitions.html

https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/gjay/www/CommonCulture.pdf