Cultural Awareness for Health Care Setting
I organized a series of programs to introduce health care providers to some common cultural practices, assumptions and expectations related to health and medical care of international students living in State College, PA. Created in partnership with staff at Mount Nittany Medical Center and Global Connections, the sessions focused on health care culture of China and Taiwan, the Middle East and Turkey, Africa and India. In addition to providing data, these programs included panel discussions where three to four citizens from the cultures made brief presentations and answered questions and answered questions from the audience
"Every cultural awareness program that we have done over the past two years has been informative, pertinent to health care providers, well organized and very well received by our staff. Our staff enjoyed hearing first hand from the international speakers about their culture, health care practices and how health care providers can better meet the needs of the cross-cultural patients we serve. Thank you, Jo Carubia, and Global Connections for partnering with us to provide cultural awareness education at Mount Nittany Medical Center."
Kathy A. Dittmann, RN, Director of Service Excellence, Mount Nittany Medical Center, State College, PA
Topics discussed included health care practices and health care systems, experiences of internationals with U.S. and local health care, role of family members, language issues and how to deal with them, information-sharing assumptions, preferences for same gender providers, women and communication and cultural practices associated with childbirth, food and health. The audience for these programs was primarily nursing staff and several of the sessions were created specifically to meet criteria for continuing education credits.