#3 Learning Goals

I've taken the Provider's Guide to Culture and Quality self-assessment quiz and did well.  Now that I have taken this quiz, I need to provide three learning outcomes that I plan on following through with.  The first would to be more culturally aware.  One question on the quiz dealt with a patient smiling and how it might mean that they are unhappy versus happy made me think.  I feel that being in the healthcare field for over twenty years I am more aware than most people, but there are things that become numb to me as well.  In life we get accustom to dealing with certain things and we tend to overlook them as they happen more and more.  I guess this could be a way of coping with situations.  An example would be a boss that always yells at his employees.  When this first happens, you are very shocked because typically you were not exposed to a boss like this before.  As time passes on, it doesn't get any easier to deal with your boss, but you learn to deal with it.  When you go into any situation and know what the type of response will be, you prepare yourself on how to react and how to prepare to respond to that situation.  Looking back at assessment two of this course, I think about the doctor that had to deal with a diabetic patient that would not follow his lead on her healthcare plan.  The doctor met with the nurse before seeing the patient and immediately was frustrated because he knew that she wouldn't listen to what he wanted her to do. He then said to her "let me see, 6 weeks of herbal tea in the desert didn't make her diabetes magically go away?" 1 He immediately went to the negative with Geraldine.  The doctor did not try to understand her culture or what it meant to here to be with family and how she wanted to deal with her illness.  If he would have tried to be more culturally aware of her family and thought practices besides Western Medicine there could have been a better outcome.  So, I am going to try to be more culturally aware of not only my staff and the patients that I see, but with my friends and family as well.  Sometimes it is more important to look and listen instead of talking.  Absorb the information around you and think before you make a statement.  Also, it is important to put your biases aside and think about the person and what they are going through.

The second learning outcome for myself leads into the last sentence of the above paragraph.  How do I put my own personal biases aside to become a better person and to deliver better healthcare for patients?  I waited to post this second outcome until I had time to reflect some more about myself.  While I was on my way to work I was thinking about how I interact with people I like versus the people that I have a harder time seeing their point of view or dislike in general.  How do I change my way of thinking about them?  A good example is when I was an MRI technologist.  Being an MRI technologist was a very busy job.  We had so many patients a day that we had to scan and it got increasingly harder to stay on time when patients would be claustrophobic or ones that did not speak English.  I never disliked the patients that could not speak English, but I would just be thinking in the back of my head "we are going to get behind schedule because this patient is going to need an interpreter,etc."  I was stereotyping these patients.   In this form of thinking we develop conventional, formulaic and oversimplified conceptions and opinions. 2 Thinking that way did make me be biased toward those patients because I knew that it was going to screw up my schedule.  So, instead of continuing that habit, I talked with my manager at the time and we worked on how to better accommodate these patients so we wouldn't get behind.  We developed time on the schedules for patients needing assistance (disabilities, mentally challenged, non-English speaking, etc.) so that we could adjust to their needs, but still be on schedule for our other patients.  This made the experience for the patients and the staff scanning them much more enjoyable.  So, looking back and taking that experience into consideration, I need to focus on people and the situations more and think through ways to not be generally biased or culturally biased.

The third learning outcome I have for myself is to communicate more effectively when working with non-English/non-verbal speaking people.  One of the questions on the quiz talked about the use of non-verbal communication and how things can be perceived differently in other cultures.  One year ago I took a religion class that really opened my eyes to these sorts of differences in cultures.  In your mind you are thinking that you are communicating effectively with a patient/person, but in actuality you might be giving off the wrong interpretation of what you are trying to get across to them.  Interpreters should be readily available in the healthcare setting to avoid these types of situations.  Another thing to remember is to have myself and staff look at the patient and not the interpreter when talking with patients.  These subtle differences make a big difference in the eyes of the patients and in some settings the patient's family.  These are all good points that I should bring up with my staff and the Chief Diversity Officer at the University of Wisconsin.


1)  Think Cultural Health. Geraldine Williams: Managed Diabetes versus Peace of Mind? https://cccm.thinkculturalhealth.hhs.gov/videos/index.htm. Accessed June 23rd, 2018

2)  Galanti, Geri-Ann. The Challenge of Serving and Working with Diverse Populations in American Hospitals. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a5a2/a07b4b27c7ae7964ba372aefae78ca168b9f.pdf. Accessed June 28th, 2018