A culture-centered exploration of health: constructions from rural Bangladesh

Culture, Structure, and Health: Narratives of Low-income Bangladeshi Migrant Workers from the United Arab Emirates

Increasingly, health scholars are paying attention to the health experiences of immigrant communities, particularly in the backdrop of the global flows of goods, services, and people across borders. In spite of the increasing public health emphasis on health outcomes of immigrants within the Middle Eastern (ME) countries, immigrant communities are often constructed as monoliths and the voices of immigrant communities are traditionally absent from mainstream health policy and program discourses. The health experiences of immigrants, their access to resources, and the health trajectories through the life-course followed by them and their descendants influence the deep-seated patterns of ethnic health disparities documented in the ME. Based on the culture-centered approach, we engaged in in-depth face-to-face interviews, and focus groups discussions with a total of 44 research participants, to understand how low-income Bangladeshi migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who live at the borders of mainstream Arab society, define, construct, and negotiate health issues. Participants articulate in their narratives their nuanced cultural understanding of good health as a complex, holistic practice, the achievement of which is obstructed by barriers such as immigration and insurance structures. Further, they enact their agency in resource impoverished circumstances to protect their mental health and physical well-being through daily strategies and acts of resistance.

Exploring the Health Narratives of Chinese Female Migrant Workers through Culture-Centered and Gender Perspectives

Female migrant workers (FMWs) represent a marginalized group in China who not only face health disparities but also lack a voice in society. Drawing on the culture-centered approach (CCA) and gender perspective to co-construct health meanings with FMWs, this research aimed to answer the question of how FMWs narrate their health and to reveal the agency of the cultural members. The in-depth interview method was applied to record the health narratives of 30 participants from October 2016 to December 2016. The results showed that FMWs' understandings of health were beset by the cultural system of gender in poverty, exploited working conditions, and discrimination in the medical context. The participants identified minimum wage and medical insurance as the key structural obstacles to healthy lives in the city. Moreover, FMWs had the agency to exercise health practices that challenge the domination of biomedicine. With gender issue threaded throughout the contextualized health narratives, the role of the gender perspective could be viewed as a "contact zone" in CCA. FMWs' agency and its interactions with structures and culture indicate the significance of engaging the voices at the margins in health communication research and praxis.

The status of cultural care among nurses working in different wards of teaching hospitals in Ardabil, Iran: A cross-sectional survey study

Introduction

Culture is an important determinant in providing appropriate and coordinated health care for people from different ethnicities. The present study aimed to evaluate the status of cultural care among nurses working in teaching hospitals affiliated to Ardabil University of Medical Sciences.

Methods

In this descriptive-correlational study, 350 nurses completed the Persian version of Cultural Care Inventory (PCCI). This tool consists of 51 items and measures cultural care process in four domains including cultural preparation, cultural attitude, cultural awareness and cultural competence. Data were analyzed by IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, version 22.

Results

The grand item mean of cultural care was 2.60 ± 0.621, which is considered poor. The grand item mean was 2.64 ± 0.78 in the subscale of cultural preparation, 3.45 ± 0.559 in cultural attitude, 2.81 ± 0.736 in cultural awareness and 2.58 ± 0.834 in cultural competence. Cultural competence was significantly related to cultural preparation (r = 0.80), cultural attitude (r = 0.62) and cultural awareness (r = 0.87).

Discussion

Based on the present findings, cultural care and its dimensions (with the exception of cultural attitude) were at a poor level. It can also be claimed that there is a direct and strong relationship between the dimensions of cultural care including cultural preparation, awareness, attitude and competence, which indicates the interdependence of these dimensions on each other. Nurses need to improve their cultural competence to ensure of providing patient-centered and culturally coordinated care.

Understanding self-construction of health among the slum dwellers of India: a culture-centred approach

Disembarking from a traditional approach of narrow hazardous environmental and structural conditions in understanding urban slums' health problems and moving towards a new notion of what constitutes health for slum dwellers will open a new avenue to recognise whether and how health is being prioritised in disadvantaged settings. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews with a total of 67 men and 68 women from Kolkata slums and 62 men and 48 women from Bangalore slums, this study explored how knowledge, social realities, material and symbolic drivers of a place interweave in shaping slum-dwellers' patterned way of understanding health, and the ways health and illnesses are managed. The current study adds to the growing evidence that ordinary members of the urban slums can articulate critical linkages between their everyday sociocultural realities and health conditions, which can support the design and delivery of interventions to promote wellbeing. The concept of health is not confined to an abstract idea but manifested in slum-dwellers' sporadic practices of preventive and curative care as well as everyday living arrangements, where a complex arrangement of physical, psychological, financial, sociocultural and environmental dimensions condition their body and wellbeing.