Cultural Competency in Home Care Assistance
At its core, cultural competency and a commitment to diversity is what sets Chosen Family Home Care apart. Through training, education, and compassion, Chosen Family Home Care emphasizes cultural competency for our diverse senior home care clients. This is built right into our company mission.
On one hand, this is true for our LGBTQ+ patients, whom are the core clients at Chosen Family Home Care. Plus, we have grown our client base that reflects the diversity of the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania senior community that we serve. This all reflects the company’s commitment to be a home care agency that is culturally competent both in our mission and through our team of caregivers that provide for diverse senior clients at home each and every day.
What is cultural competency?
- Cultural Competence refers to a combination of knowledge, skills and awareness pertaining to cultural differences and different interpretations across groups.
- It includes the awareness of and respect for differences, without making assumptions that everyone from a particular background holds the same beliefs and practices.
- It recognizes diversity
Why is cultural competency important in the LGBTQ+ and minority community?
Cultural competency is important for a variety of reasons. In all of healthcare and in Chosen Family Home Care, we strive to be culturally competent home care providers for our senior clients in order to:
- Improve the quality of services and health outcomes that patients receive
- Eliminate health disparities that persist in the community
- Increase comfort and patient satisfaction through more relevant and tailored care
If you reference our guide outlining the challenges that LGBT seniors face, it can offer perspective within this community. The article shows why cultural competence in healthcare is important for gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer seniors.
What are some examples of culturally competent healthcare and home care assistance services?
There are a variety of ways that a healthcare provider can be more culturally competent in their delivery of care. While not all items below are applicable to home care services, Chosen Family Home Care utilizes as many tools as possible to practice cultural competence in its caregiver support services. Ways that healthcare providers can be more culturally competent include:
- Improved language and translation services. It is important for healthcare providers to have access to translation and language services for those that might not speak English well or have other barriers. This could include having bilingual staff when available.
- Being aware of and knowledgeable about cultural traditions. When healthcare providers are unfamiliar about cultural traditions and how they shape medical care, it can be difficult for them to connect to their patients.
- Asking patients about their desired pronouns and using their pronouns as the client requests. Understand why clients might have gender-neutral pronouns and how it affects their identity. Some people have a gender identity that is non-binary, and conventional pronouns have the effect of assigning them a binary identity.
- Improving the patient’s health literacy. Patients with different backgrounds may not understand healthcare practices well.
- Tossing out cultural assumptions. Many individuals have different cultural assumptions they develop over time. This is a unique challenge that people face and education and open mindedness to different cultures can help overcome them.
How does Chosen Family Home Care practice cultural competency?
Chosen Family Home Care is working everyday towards its goal of being the most culturally competent and diverse provider of home care across all of Pennsylvania. We achieve this by being a home care assistance provider that is:
- Welcoming: Chosen Family fosters a caring and accepting environment for all of our patients
- Data collection: We collect relevant patient information that factor in cultural and language distinctions for more effective care and patient satisfaction.
- Confidentiality: We practice strict confidentiality to ensure that the patient’s privacy and comfort level are always our top priority.
- Risk Factors: We identify and monitor the risk factors that disproportionately affect the LGBTQ+ community and focus on LGBTQ-specific issues that impact the community. Chosen Family Home Care does this for other high risk populations as well such as minorities and those in underserved communities of Philadelphia.
- Advocacy and community connections: We link our patients to community partners and resources that are relevant in overcoming barriers to health and happiness within the LGBTQ+ community and the greater Philadelphia area. These include mental health, housing, HIV/AIDS, employment, social connection, and financial resources for all of our diverse clients served.
- Training: We provide employee training and development that increases cultural awareness, knowledge, and skills.
- Diversity recruitment: Chosen Family Home Care actively works to recruit and retain minority caregivers and employees as part of its diverse team.
