Discussion Post: Psychosocial Factors & Patient Education
The difference in culture, origin, and worldviews significantly affects how healthcare professionals handle various patients. Consequently, while working with Sister Mary, a healthcare professional's possible reservations could have included spirituality, social beliefs, and religious beliefs. Spirituality is the connection between human beings and supernatural beings, essential in patients' lives. Nonetheless, most health providers do not talk about religious beliefs and spirituality during patient education due to various reasons, such as poor communication, psychosocial factors, and time limits (Henderson et al., 2018). When caring for Sister Mary, healthcare providers must recognize their own biases, try to focus on their care, and not on assumptions or judgments. The most important step in reducing prejudice is acknowledging that it exists and working on being mindful of those attitudes when providing care (Narayan, 2019). A health professional should remain respectful and culturally competent; thus, a health professional should desist from discrimination and judging a patient by appearance, dialect, spiritual inclination, degree of illness, and behavior.
Cultural competence is essential in providing quality and patient-centered care; therefore, while working with Sister Mary, a health provider should make reservations that do not contradict her social beliefs. In a clinical setting, health providers come across patients, such as Sister Mary, who have varied beliefs and cultures; thus, a health professional should reserve their ideas to learn and understand Mary's religious and cultural beliefs (Lin et al., 2017). Moreover, other reservations a health professional could make include offering compassion and love to Sister Mary, irrespective of the differences in their cultural and social beliefs. Reservations in health care allow healthcare professionals to tailor-make the treatment process to suit every patient; thus, it requires critical thinking, justice, beneficence and nonmaleficence.
What possible reservations could a health care professional have in working with Sister Mary? (Discuss the psychosocial responses the professional might have.)
The response must include a reference list. Using Times New Roman 12 pnt font, double-space, one-inch margins, and APA style of writing and citations.