Cultural Humility: Learning for Understanding the Cultural Health Practices of Clients

Abstract

Cultural humility is an important tool and attitude for health care providers. It is the way to learn and understand the cultural beliefs and health behaviors of patients from a different cultural background. Moreover, it is a lifelong learning process of self-reflection and critical thinking. Cultural humility leads to involve a quality of health care service that meets the needs of patients in accordance with the way of life and culture in their cultural contexts. From the health practitioner, cultural humility attitude requires: 1) open-mindedness to learn from people’s ideas and cultural beliefs; 2) self-awareness, to recognize self and other’s strengths and limitations; 3) to be egoless, so to look at others as truly equals; 4) supportive interactions; 5) self-reflection and critique, to learn from understanding others.The objectives of this article tells about the concept of cultural humility, cultural health assessment, learning and understanding the cultural health practices of clients.