Venturing Out of Your Academic Comfort Zone and Cultural Distress at the Point of Clinical Care

Source: Redbooth.com

The conclusion of this project, recently published in the Journal of Transcultural Nursing,  serves as a personal reminder of synergy when collaboration extends beyond your academic comfort zone. The output is frequently greater than the sum of the individual parts.

More importantly, thank you Dr. Christine DeWilde (PhD) for including me in this novel project that explores the emerging paradigm of cultural distress in healthcare, one that potentially results in increased psychological symptoms of stress in the clinical environment.

Through structured interviews with validated assessment tools of 100 patients at VCU Health, including the infectious diseases clinic, we learned that cultural stress, in part defined by structural stressors (gender, age, ethnicity, religion, income, sexual orientation etc) had no influence on psychological stress but was associated with perceived discrimination in the healthcare setting.  

How to best counter perceived patient discrimination remains unknown but certainly not irrelevant in this day of patient centered care , where the expectation is to provide the right care at the right time and at the right place.