Heritage

Heritage Assessment in Evaluating the Needs of the Whole Person. The heritage assessment tool is useful in providing a view or the whole person. Understanding how different people deal with medical issues, get medical care, and tools they use in different cultures. Culture plays an important role in how medical procedures are done in different countries. Using an assessment tool enables you to get a more complete picture of the individual. The practice of using a variety of questions to more fully assess people give us a picture of the whole-person. Leininger, has defined transcultural nursing as “the humanistic and scientific area of formal study and practice in nursing which is focused on differences and similarities among cultures with respect to human care, health, and illness based on people’s cultural values, beliefs, and practices, and to use this knowledge to give culturally specific or culturally congruent nursing care to people” [p.60]. Using heritage assessment tools in nursing can bring about benefits for patients, families, nurses and health care providers in terms of getting a whole picture of people in different cultures. Knowing about people’s cultural values and understanding the importance can help nurses take better care of our patients. “An increased focus on the efficiency and effectiveness of health services, patient safety, and risk management, means that provision of culturally responsive and competent health services will inevitably become paramount.”(Higginbottom, Richter, & Mogalel, 2011)
Family Interviews Three families of different cultures, were interviewed to see how they handled health maintenance, health protection, and health restoration. Each family handles these issues differently depending on their cultural beliefs. The families interviewed included a Hispanic, Native American, and Caucasian. “Culture, as an element of ethnicity, consists of shared patterns of values and behaviors that characterize a particular