Caring for Patients from Different Cultures

This extensively updated edition of a definitive text provides healthcare workers with a solid frame of reference for understanding—and successfully addressing—cultural differences

Healthcare workers in the American medical system may find that patients from different cultures bring unfamiliar expectations, anxieties, and needs into the examination room. To provide optimal care, it is important to see differences from the patient’s perspective and to be able to engage with patients from a range of demographics.

For thirty-five years now, Caring for Patients from Different Cultures has been a vital resource for nurses and physicians, offering hundreds of case studies that illustrate and explain cross cultural conflicts or misunderstandings along with myriad concrete examples of how to best address them. That is, in addition to showing what can go wrong in healthcare when cultural conflicts arise, the authors provide field-proven guidance on how to make things right. In this edition particularly, it does so without making culture the culprit by acknowledging the broader contexts in which health unfolds. As in previous editions, Caring for Patients from Different Cultures covers a wide range of topics affecting how care is provided and received, including traditional medicine, mental health, pain, religion and spirituality, gender, aging, and birth, death, and the in-between. Cultural differences among healthcare workers themselves also are addressed.

New to the sixth edition is a foundational chapter that discusses the history and importance of taking what we now call a “culturally attuned” approach to care while also explaining the centrality of various social determinants of health. There is also more material related to preventive care and wellness and in-depth explanations of theoretical concepts are found in boxes that now pepper the book. Readers will come away with knowledge of how important a deep, nuanced, and context-aware understanding of “culture” is to patients’ (and the world’s) future health status. Most importantly, they will gain a solid frame of reference for understanding—and successfully addressing—cultural differences.