A key indicator of relationship-centered care is understanding culture. Culture includes the attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and characteristics common to a group of people. This can be as limited as close family to as broad as a community, state, region, or nation.
Cultural competence is the integration and transformation of knowledge about individuals and groups to create standards, policies, acceptable behaviors, practices, and attitudes within that group, with degrees of variation, of course.
Cultural humility encompasses the ability to maintain a relationship that is different from our own, to honor and respect others for who they are, not who we think they should be.
It is impossible to understand every aspect of a culture; it is easy to generate stereotypes. That is one reason why it is so important to remain open to learning new ideas and ways of doing things and responding to life. This helps design a partnership of awareness and acceptance. Instead of basing our own attitudes on a generalization of a culture, we seek to learn about the individual, what makes him/her a unique and viable person within that culture and within our realm of friendship.
From the outside, a culture may appear to be simply food, games, language, customs, and dress. But when you dig deeper, that is when you find many of the other aspects of a culture: values, religious beliefs, notions of beauty and norms, thought processes, and the concept of fairness, to name just a few. Instead of drawing assumptions and tossing people into convenient packaging, cultural humility means listening, being open-minded, asking questions and accepting the answers, and learning. We are all different - and that is OK.
