The Patient Experience

Be prepared for the culturally rich and diverse world of healthcare! This concise, easy-to-read handbook prepares you to relate to individuals from different cultures. Use it in class and clinical now and as a reference throughout your career. The Purnell Model is your guide as you explore 34 different cultures and the issues that you need to be sensitive to...including cultural variations regarding personal space, dietary preferences, communication, symptom management, activities of daily living, and religious and health practices.

If you're going to have a heart attack, an organ transplant, or a joint replacement, here's the key to getting the very best medical care: be a white, straight, middle-class male. This book by a pioneering black surgeon takes on one of the few critically important topics that haven't figured in the heated debate over health care reform- the largely hidden yet massive injustice of bias in medical treatment. Growing up in Jim Crow-era Tennessee and training and teaching in overwhelmingly white medical institutions, Gus White witnessed firsthand how prejudice works in the world of medicine. And while race relations have changed dramatically, old ways of thinking die hard. In Seeing Patients White draws upon his experience in startlingly different worlds to make sense of the unconscious bias that riddles medical treatment, and to explore what it means for health care in a diverse twenty-first-century America. White and co-author David Chanoff use extensive research and interviews with leading physicians to show how subconscious stereotyping influences doctor-patient interactions, diagnosis, and treatment. Their book brings together insights from the worlds of social psychology, neuroscience, and clinical practice to define the issues clearly and, most importantly, to outline a concrete approach to fixing this fundamental inequity in the delivery of health care.

Healthcare providers 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 for all patients, it is important to see differences from the patient's perspective and to work with patients from a range of demographics. Caring for Patients from Different Cultures has been a vital resource for nurses and physicians for more than twenty years, offering hundreds of case studies that illustrate crosscultural conflicts or misunderstandings as well as examples of culturally competent health care. Now in its fifth edition, Caring for Patients from Different Cultures covers a wide range of topics, including birth, end of life, communication, traditional medicine, mental health, pain, religion, and multicultural staff challenges. This edition includes more than sixty new cases with an expanded appendix, introduces a new chapter on improving adherence, and updates the concluding chapter with examples of changes various hospitals have made to accommodate cultural differences. Grounded in concepts from the fields of cultural diversity and medical anthropology, Caring for Patients from Different Cultures provides healthcare workers with a frame of reference for understanding cultural differences and sound alternatives for providing the best possible care to multicultural communities.

Virtually all physicians know that effective communication reduces malpractice risk. What may be less apparent is how it can also contribute to the practice of good medicine, even in the managed care setting. In this volume, health-care journalist Chris Hinz draws on research and real-life case examples to teach physicians and others involved in direct contact with patients valuable interpersonal communication skills and techniques. Hinz demonstrates, through slice-of-life vignettes and sample dialogue, how a physician's deeper understanding of patients - especially in more difficult situations - can help patients to understand the physician more completely.

-- Presents coverage of 16 ethnic and cultural groups in North America in the book and 11 more on a computer disk packaged with the book, for a total of 27 groups covered -- Organizing framework provides coherence for the culture-specific chapters and teaches students how to perform cultural assessments -- The organizing framework is presented in table form to assist users in collecting information about cultures not addressed in the book -- The foundation of the book is a 12-step organizational structure for examining any culture from a healthcare perspective: inhabited localities, topography, and overview; biocultural ecology; high-risk behaviors; communications; nutrition; family roles and organization; pregnancy and childbearing practices; healthcare practices; spirituality; healthcare practitioners; death rituals; workforce issues -- Case studies, study questions, and a list of key works appear in each culture-specific chapter; the key words for each chapter are defined in the book's glossary

A professor of nursing, expert in multicultural health care and social services, describes the basic attitudes and beliefs of 15 important ethnic and religious groups in America and shows how these traits can affect behavior during illness or during social work interventions. Sensitive to problems of stereotyping, each chapter on an immigrant group provides some information about its homeland and population in the United States and then discusses the culture's modes of communication, its socioeconomic status, chief complaints, traditional family system, religious beliefs, views toward the elderly, child-rearing practices, culturally based health beliefs and practices, dietary patterns, characteristics relating to morbidity and mortality, beliefs about death and dying, physical assessment, and sources for further reading. The introduction points to a few key sources for continuing information about the care of multicultural patients and clients.

Using case studies in the areas of diabetes, mammography, and mass communication campaigns, this title examines the ways in which messages must be adapted to the informational needs of their audiences if they are to have any real impact. It looks at theories of communication and behavior change and focuses on where they apply and where they don't.