Ethnic Plurality and Health
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Cognitive Therapy in Cross-cultural Contexts:
making clinical sense of occult beliefs - Tahirah Parveen
A close examination of the way in which the established conceptual approaches can be extended and developed in such a way as to to facilitate positive therapetic engagement with patients of unfamiliar backgrounds, and whose expressions of psychological distress are all to often read as bizarre and irrational. -
Clinical Provision of Ethnosensitive Counselling: from the Margins to the Centre - Tahirah Parveen
In addition to setting out a brief account of the skills and competences which counsellors and psychotherapists need to have aboard if the are to deliver clinically effective services, this paper also sets out to identify the obstacles which have hindered - and continue to hinder - the development of such initiatives. It suggests that the greatest obstacles to progress lie in the conservatism of established institutional practice, in the reluctance of service providers to reexamine their own professional ideologies, and in the extreme difficulties encountered by minority professionals who seek to make their voices heard. -
New Spaces and Possibilities: The Adjustment to Parenthood for New Migrant Mothers - by Ruth de Souza
Migrant women who become new mothers in New Zealand say their cultural needs are often not met or understood by health professionals. Funded by the New Zealand Families Commission Blue Skies Fund, the researchers interviewed 40 Chinese, Korean, South African, British, American, Indian, Palestinian and Iraqi women about their experience of pregnancy and birth in New Zealand.The report's author Ruth DeSouza of AUT University's Centre for Asian and Migrant Health Research, makes a range of recommendations as a result of the study. These include making improvements to support services and communication, providing translations of relevant information, and above all the development of an enhanced degree of cultural comptence amongst service providers. -
Translating Genetics Leaflets Into Languages Other Than English: Lessons From an Assessment of Urdu Materials - by Alison Shaw and Mushtaq Ahmed
Although the formal focus of this article - the translation of educational leaflets for the parents of children suffering from diseases which have been genetically precipitated into Urdu - may seem, on the face of it, to be exceedingly narrow, the lessons which can be learned from it are of much wider applicability. The authors not only explore the difficulties of finding an appropriate vocabulary in which to represent human reproductive processes when the target audience operate within a very different conceptual universe from that which the original (English-speaking) target audience operate, but in doing so highlight the way in which efforts to achieve 'accurate' translation can have unexpected consequences. If translators have to resort to specialist dictionaries to identify what they hope are Urdu equivalents of technical terms in English, the likelihood of the target (popular) audience gaining an accurate appreciation of the ideas which the leaflet-writers intended to convey is remote. -
Hearing different voices: Methodological pluralism in nursing education and research - by Ruth De Souza
This paper discusses the need for multi-cultural methodologies that develop knowledge about the maternity experience of migrant women themselves and that are attuned to women's maternity related requirements under multi-cultural conditions. It challenges the positivist hegemony of previously completed research on migrant women by reflecting on my own experience as a researcher grounded in a broadly-based, pluralistic set of critical epistemologies that allowed me to uncover the issues and contexts that impacted on the experience of migrant women. -
The Implications of Cultural Diversity for Health Care Practice: an anthropological perspective - by Roger Ballard
This paper explores the roots of the practical difficulties which doctors and nurses so often encounter in the course of their interactions with South Asian patients, taking issues of hygiene as its central empirical focus. It argues that many of the 'problems' which health care staff encounter in this area are ultimately of their own making, above all because their professional training has not provided them with a sufficient degree of cultural competence to match their technical skills. If this is indeed the case, their overall clinical competence will necessarily be impaired when dealing with a poly-ethnic clientele.
Although originally prepared for a BMA Conference held in 1983, the arguments set forth in this paper remain just as relevant as they were two decades ago.