Nursing Heritage Assessment Essay

Nursing Heritage Assessment

The Heritage Assessment Tool is a useful way of examining how strongly a person identifies with his or her heritage. It asks questions that can give a healthcare provider information about how long the family has been in the United States, how many generations of the family have been in the United States, how close the family is with other family members, whether the person lives in an ethnically-identified community, and whether the person married someone from the same cultural background (Spector, 2000). Furthermore, the questions in the assessment tool also seem aimed at helping determine whether the person is from a minority ethnic community. While it is not always the case, people who belong to minority groups may be more likely to identify with ethnic sub-communities. This can have a tremendous impact on the healthcare choices made by the individual patient, so that understanding a patient's heritage can be important.

My own heritage assessment did not reveal me as highly identifying with my cultural heritage. This makes sense to me because I come from a diverse ethnic background, so that my family's personal cultural traditions draw from a variety of different backgrounds. Personally, I have found that this makes my family more accepting of outside traditions. In the context of a medical approach, I believe that this would make me more likely to accept novel medical treatments than a person whose cultural traditions might make them wary of certain medical approaches.

In fact, the Heritage Assessment Tool can be a way of helping ensure cultural competency. "Cultural and linguistic competence is a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or among professionals that enables effective work in cross-cultural situations" (The Office of Minority Health, 2012). Cultural competency is important because cultural norms can dictate not only what treatments a patient will accept, but also the manner of treatment. For example, cultural norms may prohibit certain female patients from accepting treatment from male doctors, or help describe which family or community members would be involved in an individual's healthcare decisions. "Cultural competency is one the main ingredients in closing the disparities gap in health care. It's the way patients and doctors can come together and talk about health concerns without cultural differences hindering the conversation, but enhancing it" (The Office of Minority Health, 2012).

These differences become clear when looking at families from different cultural backgrounds. Because of the diversity of my own cultural background, I chose not to examine my family, but focused, instead, on three families with strongly-identified ethnic backgrounds. The first family was a family of zero-generation and first-generation Muslim immigrants from Pakistan. The second family was a family of zero-generation and first-generation Hindu immigrants from India. The third family was a family of zero-generation, first-generation, second-generation, third-generation, and fourth generation Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. While all of the families came from the same apparent comfortably middle-class family backgrounds, their approaches to healthcare were sufficiently different to indicate some strong cultural differences.

The Jewish family placed a tremendous emphasis on health, with regular doctor visits and a proactive approach to eliminating potential health difficulties. Judaism puts a historical and religious emphasis on health maintenance, so much so that medical treatment might be seen as an obligation for observant Jews (My Jewish Learning, Unk.). This approach was certainly visible in the family interviewed, which stressed the importance of routine medical care, regular exercise, and maintenance of good health habits. In addition, while the family drank alcohol, it was very discouraging of negative health habits, such as smoking. They did not identify any cultural traditions that would impact medical treatment. While they acknowledged that more orthodox Jews might have to observe gender-rules and norms, the family did not observe these gender rules. Likewise, none of the family members kept kosher, so that their dietary healthcare concerns were not based upon religious traditions. In fact, their approach to healthcare seemed very similar to my own cultural healthcare traditions, though they placed a much higher emphasis on preventative healthcare than my own family does.

The Muslim family initially…