Reflective Journal: Culturally Sensitive Senior Care Practices

This reflective journal explores the concept of culturally sensitive care for seniors, emphasizing the importance of cultural safety in healthcare settings. The student reflects on the impact of cultural diversity on patient care, highlighting the need for healthcare professionals to understand and respect different cultural preferences, religious beliefs, and family customs. The journal discusses the role of critical thinking, interpersonal relationships, and self-awareness in providing culturally competent care. The student references relevant literature, including works by Cottrell (2017), Gerlach (2012), and Truong et al. (2014), to support their insights and opinions. The journal concludes by emphasizing the significance of cultural competency in fostering effective communication and building trust between healthcare professionals and patients, ultimately leading to improved patient outcomes. The author also highlights the importance of this practice in their future professional career.

Running head: PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION
CULTURALLY SENSITIVE CARE OF SENIORS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION
Old age care plan has a central goal to provide the elders of the society a healthy body
and mind through medical interventions so that their rest of the life becomes easier and happier.
However, cultural diversity becomes a barrier to this system as depending on their diversity,
patients requires several special interventions which should be managed by the healthcare facility
(Cottrell, 2017). While going through this concept in the session 3a, I was able to understand
other concepts such as critical thinking and reasoning, interpersonal relationships and its role in
culturally competent healthcare practice. In this assignment I will be reflecting on these learnings
in a form of reflective journal and will cover all aspects of it.
Cultural safety is an important aspect in nursing as it is the responsibility of the
professionals to care and respect the religion, food, personal thinking, family and religion related
customs and lifestyle related resources (Truong, Paradies & Priest, 2014). This is also important
as these facts are important to nourish and maintain the health and wellbeing of associated
people. Hence, it has the biggest impact on my practice as this concept is important for me to
understand to care immigrants of patients having different preferences. While studying this
lesson, the four aspects of cultural safety was an “aha” moment for me, as I was unaware of these
concepts before. Hence, after learning the lesson I totally agree to the fact that to become
nonjudgmental towards others choices, we should develop personal and professional self-
awareness as well as should possess organizational and community related awareness so that
while treating a patient of different culture, we are able to maintain the cross cultural relations
(Patankar, 2012). I would not support any alternative perspective to this as these four aspects are
able to manifest cultural competency within healthcare professionals. Hence, while mentioning
my thoughts and opinions about today’s study, I would like to state the cultural competency is an
important aspect of patient and healthcare experts relationship that triggers the speedy recovery

2PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION
of patients. This is because interpersonal communication without being judgmental increases the
trust of patients upon healthcare professionals hence, they receive all the interventions without
any hesitation to attain recovery. To understand more about cultural competency, I read the book
written by Cottrell (2017), which states that cultural competency treats a minor patient equally
and removes all of his doubt regarding his cultural safety while receiving care in the healthcare
facility. Hence, the cultural competency should be meaningful and sensitive (Gerlach, 2012).
Therefore, this topic has huge implication in my future, as while conducting my professional
career I want to treat each of my patients equally despite their different origin, culture,
community and society. Finally, this practice has critical role in communication, as depending on
cultural safety, patients will be motivated to convey their preferences to the healthcare
professionals, depending on which, proper intervention will be applied to the patients (Pauly et
al., 2012).
While concluding this reflective journal, it should be mentioned that cultural safety is an
important aspect of senior healthcare nowadays and therefore, it is the duty of healthcare
professionals to learn about concept clearly to manage such situation in future.

3PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION
References
Cottrell, S. (2017). Critical thinking skills, 1st edn, pp. 123-145, Macmillan Education.
Gerlach, A. J. (2012). A critical reflection on the concept of cultural safety. Canadian Journal of
Occupational Therapy, 79(3), 151-158.
Patankar, M. S. (2012). Safety culture: Building and sustaining a cultural change in aviation and
healthcare., 2nd edn, pp. 67-89, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd..
Pauly, B. B., McCall, J., Browne, A. J., Parker, J., & Mollison, A. (2015). Toward cultural
safety: nurse and patient perceptions of illicit substance use in a hospitalized
setting. Advances in nursing science, 38(2), 121-135.
Truong, M., Paradies, Y., & Priest, N. (2014). Interventions to improve cultural competency in
healthcare: a systematic review of reviews. BMC health services research, 14(1), 99.