Assessment of Three Families using Heritage Assessment Tool

Introduction

Heritage assessment tool is used as a liable instrument to evaluate health maintenance, health protection and restoration of cultural beliefs of individuals, families, and communities. This evaluation tool assists to meet the wants of different patient populations to provide quality health care (Ring, 2008).  Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the cultural beliefs of three different families, which include Protestant, Hispanic, and American from perspectives of health traditions, maintenance, promotion, protection, and re-establishment of better health conditions. On the same note, the paper aims at performing a heritage assessment on the three families, identify common health traditions based on cultural heritage, evaluate, and discuss how the families subscribe to these traditions and practices to address health maintenance, health protection and restoration as they relate to the assessment.

In this context, definition of cultural awareness refers to an individual`s knowledge of the understanding between themselves and their background, attitudes, and cultural values (Ring, 2008). Therefore, the assessment questions to these three families were related to health beliefs and practices, which included events such as in their childhood that may have contributed to their adherence or neglect of cultural values and beliefs in adulthood.

Usefulness of Applying a Heritage Assessment

Assessment of a patient`s heritage allows nurses to obtain more information about the cultural beliefs of individuals, families, and the entire community (Clark, 2002). These pieces of information regarding health status, cultural beliefs, and values may be important to providing cultural based health care among communities and conducting regular patient`s  assessment to enables comparison of health tradition of the three different families.

On an additional note, heritage assessment tool has the ability to draw out answers from different individuals in consideration of cultural background, religion, family structure, social construction, education level, nutrition status, language, and migration pattern (Ring, 2008). As a result, a nurse can be able to analyze and understand these aspects of families and the community so that patients will be approached and properly taken care of (Radić, 2006).   In this regard, an individual’s cultural background, religion belief, and values greatly influence a person’s health status and their response to health and medical care that play an important role in helping the nurse take care of a patient better.

Cultural heritage plays a big role in the economic, social and health promotion of the individuals and families. Therefore, the use of heritage assessment tools helps healthcare providers to evaluate and look at someone’s heritage as well as traditional health methods used to maintain health, protect health, and restore health. As such, by applying these concepts, it helps healthcare professionals to deal with a person’s physical, mental, and spiritual beliefs (Radić, 2006).

Since unique cultures have distinct cultural values and beliefs about health, diseases, illnesses, birth time, and death circumstances (Clark, 2002). Assessment of cultural competencies is therefore important in providing the best health strategic approach and intervention to resolve health condition or event. On a similar note, heritage assessment tools help both the patient and the health care provider by opening a pathway for an effective communication of one’s values, beliefs, attitudes, in regards to health, ill health, family support as well as spiritual values (Radić, 2006). For example, differences of Hispanic, Protestant, and American tradition are compared in this paper, to help in analyzing health maintenance, health promotion, and health restoration in these unique cultures.

Common Health Traditions Based on Cultural Heritage

The assessment revealed different health traditions that normally affect health and livelihood of the three families such as the ability of the members of a particular family to plan activities that control nature and environmental factors (Ring, 2008).  These environmental factors included complex systems of traditional health and beliefs about illness, practices of traditional medicine and the utilization of traditional herbalists.

In was only exposed during the assessment that the families differed in biological aspect of health due to their variations in cultural practices and behaviors, which influence body building and structure, enzyme invasion and genetic variation, susceptibility and vulnerability to infections and variation in nutrition status (Clark, 2002).  Furthermore, social organization such as family unit, and social group organizations such as religion, ethnic background, place of both, and residential place were identified to affect access and up take of health care services of a particular family.

Plan for Health Maintenance, Health Protection, and Health Restoration

The following interventions may help nurses to understand their patients better and allow them to provide needed care in consideration of heritage (Ring, 2008). First, a nurse should understand and analyze a patient`s cultural beliefs to acquire basic knowledge of patient`s cultural values, behavior and attitudes and treat the patient`s respectfully without being judgmental (Radić, 2006). Secondly, a health provider such as nurse should enhance communication to determine the patient`s level of fluency in language use by a nurse and arrange for an interpreter where appropriate. In addition, a health provider should use open-ended questions to obtain health information and ask how the patient will be preferred to be addressed (Clark, 2002). Lastly, a health provide including a nurse should promote positive behavior by building on the patient`s cultural practice, reinforcing positive practices and promoting change on those cultural practice and behaviors which are harmful.

In conclusion, cultural assessments are core in facilitating effective and efficient health utilization and provision. Therefore, patients from each family must be assessed to identify given tradition, place emphasis on discovering the role that each heritage plays in health and determine specific reasons for the occurrence of health problem within a cultural context.