Heritage Assessment Essay

What is a heritage assessment? A heritage assessment is a subpart to the overall nursing assessment. Assessing a patient’s heritage allows the nurse to obtain more information about a patient’s culture, including beliefs about health and values, this is important to providing cultural health care. One’s heritage includes information about their cultural beliefs and practices of the family and ethno religious community (Jarvis, C. , 2012). Through a heritage assessment the nurse can obtain a vast amount of information about the patient/ family, including but not limited to, where ancestors were born, how many siblings they have, if the family originated in another country, how often time is spent with family, religion, if the patient prefers the company of people with the same values and religion or ethnic background, what type of foods the patient prepares, and the patient’s native language. This paper will discuss what the author learned from completing a heritage assessment tool, the usefulness of a heritage assessment tool when assessing a patient/ family/ community as a whole. This paper will also compare the health traditions of three different families (and cultures) to include, health maintenance, health protection, and health restoration, while identifying common traditions based on the author’s heritage. What the families ascribe their traditions to will also be discussed. To begin, what was learned from the heritage assessment tool and why it is useful to apply a heritage assessment in evaluating the needs of a â€Å"whole† person should be discussed. Useful information and insight was gained from completing the heritage assessment tool. Once complete, there were lots of negative responses noted, meaning, the author has very little identification with her traditional heritage. It should not be assumed that everyone identifies with their traditional heritage; this could in turn result in the delivery of poor health care and/ or education. If you are not already familiar with your beliefs and practices the heritage assessment tool is very helpful in getting you there, and helping you learn more about what heritage is. When evaluating the needs of a â€Å"whole† person a heritage assessment is useful and necessary. One of the most important reasons that a heritage assessment is useful is because it helps practitioners in providing culturally appropriate health care. Discovering what cultures and beliefs you are facing through appropriate assessment is very important. The culturally competent nurse must have knowledge in four areas: (1) your own personal heritage (which one can discover through the heritage assessment tool), (2) the heritage of the nursing profession, (3) the heritage of the health care system, and (4) the heritage of the patient (utilization of a heritage assessment tool is also helpful). Throughout nursing education various types of physical examination and assessments are learned, including, health history, mental health assessment, and nutritional assessment. However, depending on the patient’s heritage the information you gather may vary widely, therefore a heritage assessment must be an integral part of a complete physical and health assessment (Jarvis, C. , 2012). Next, health traditions will be discussed. Health traditions vary greatly amongst different cultures. The three areas to be discussed for the purpose of this paper are; health maintenance (how families maintain health and prevent illness); health protection (what measures are taken to protect the body from illness); and health restoration (what is done to restore the body o the prior level of functioning after an illness). Three families from different cultures were interviewed about the three areas mentioned. The cultural backgrounds included that of the author (African American), Mexican American, and Caucasian American. The findings of the interviews are identified in the table below (information including but not limited to what is listed). These families of different cultures ascribed their health traditions to different things. The African American family states that their health traditions are passed down by elders (grandparents), of both sexes. The Mexican American family ascribes their traditions to the women of the family, stating that it is a female responsibility to pass down traditions regarding heath. The Caucasian American family states that they received their knowledge of health from what is or has been proved by science, and usually each mother of the household is responsible for the health of the family.