Culture and Its Impact On Wellness

[Carol Twaits]

I am a Maternal-Child Health RN in New York City.

I am looking for an international RN to communicate with and to have them assist me in exploring, comparing, and evaluating the effects of cultural diversity on the health status and response to care in their perspective communities.

Thank you.

[Bozo180]

I don't know if this is exactly what you are after but I've done a fair bit of work in outback Australia (300km from the nearest resemblance of a hospital) and in my current endeavours in East Timor have had to do the occasional Humanitarian Aid task.

The biggest lesson I've learned to date is that, as an outsider, you have to adapt to the community. If a villager with malaria or dengue fever hasn't walked to the local clinic yet, chances are he never will......irrespective of how well, through an interpreter, you explain the consequences of not going. They have their ways; some places have had these ways for hundreds of years. Don't try to change it, adapt your interventions to their way of life.

I'm probably way left field of your thread though....

Bozo

[mother/babyRN, RN]

Actually, if I may speak from the standpoint of someone who must cater to multi cultural standards in a maternal child setting, it sounds like that is wonderful advice...I think I will have to look this up, but I recently read a wonderful book having to do with a little Laotian girl with a seizure disorder and the cultural sensitivities and difficulties she and her family (as well as the California medical community involved with them) underwent. It 's title something like "The Spirit moves me and then I fall down,: I will look for it and get the title correct, but it does a magnificent job of describing two different cultural approaches to epilepsy, as well as how totally at odds two cultures can be in their approaches and eventual coming together. Would certainly provide some good reference material for your interests...