Cross-cultural health care.

Abstract

The challenge of cross-cultural health care is to work successfully with persons and communities whose cultural beliefs and assumptions regarding health, illness, healing, and human relations may differ in fundamental ways from those of the health care worker. Cross-cultural health care will be facilitated by acceptance of the concept of multiculturalism as a positive value for Canadian society by willingness to seek creative compromises between scientific and traditional cultural concepts of health and illness; and by health workers' comfort with the advocacy role, and their enjoyment of the challenge of learning about and working with people of diverse cultures.