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Hello. I’m so glad to be back for our sixth edition. Thank you, ChiroSecure for offering this opportunity for us to connect as a community to different communities as doctors of chiropractic. Again, I’m Dr. Charmaine Herman, and this is the fifth part. I’m sorry. The six part of cultural competence.
One-on-one for the chiropractor. I’m glad that you joined me this today, and we’re going to go through a few slides and just talk about a few things more about being culturally competent.
So again, I’m Dr. Charmaine Herman. I am a doctor of chiropractic. I teach full-time at life university, college of chiropractic. I’m also in practice here in Alpharetta, Georgia at adopted upper cervical health center. And I’ve been here for nine years in private practice. So we’re going to go ahead and move on to the next.
So our goal today is to actually talk about again, how to be a culturally competent chiropractic and how do I apply that information to practice? What do I do in my practice to be culturally competent?
First we talked that the culturally competent chiropractor is the doctor of chiropractic, who first acknowledges their own culture. He is also, or she is also one who is willing to look at their conscious and unconscious biases and evaluate them as well. The doctor of chiropractic, who is culturally competent, will definitely respect other cultures.
He or she will also educate themselves about the cultures and the communities that they serve, especially things such as health disparities in their communities. They’ll also refuse to stereotype or profile individuals based upon assumptions or stereotypes that have been set up about us particular. Culturally competent chiropractor will also make a concerted effort to serve outside of their community, not just in their own communities, but also outside of their communities and not be afraid to ask questions respectively, respectfully about people in their cultures.
If you’re not sure you want to know about a person in their culture, you would ask. And again, respectfully. And adaptive chiropractic who’s culturally competent will also continue to perform self assessments, evaluating your own self, to determine if you are actually growing and becoming more and more culturally competent, even to the point of being culturally proficient or another term that you might hear right now having cultural agility.
So we’ll talk about that next year, we get more into the.
So at the end of the day, we talk about being a culturally competent chiropractor. We realize that one size does not fit all. We want to go ahead and give our patients who are all individuals and all have individual cultures and experiences and want to understand. Experiences, because that affects how they are compliant to care, how they think about the care that they receive and even how they tell others about the care that they receive from your practice.
So now let’s talk about how to, again, apply cultural competence to the chiropractic practice. We talked more about that in episode five, but now we’re going to review one or two things here in episode six.
So being culturally competent, meaning means also looking at your media ads, your media and your ad messages that you put out there. We have a large social media. Now the network is huge and people are looking at what we say and what we post and what we think. So you want to watch what you post and the people that you follow on your.
Prac practice, Facebook page or Instagram page or whatever you’re using Twitter, things like that. People are paying attention. So you want to pay attention to the messages that you send out. You want to make sure that you’re not sending any intentionally or unintentionally. Negative messages in your print media, in your websites.
Things such as that when you’re marketing, you want to provide an inclusive message about your practice. So patients won’t feel that they’re being excluded from coming to see you when they need your assistance.
Some generic advertising usually shows particular types of individuals here. We have an ad showing a white male chiropractor assisting a white male patient. So it’s a generic ad that many ad agencies will use and try to sell you to use for your practice or put on your website. But does that include the people that you’re actually serving in your committee?
You want to make sure you’re giving messages again, that are inclusive, that show people that you’re open to receive all types of patients in your community. So again, consider your message. When you’re marketing your post, your likes, what does it say about you and about the community and your willingness to serve as a doctor of chiropractor?
Using diverse images. PR actually gives you a more inclusive look as a doctor of chiropractic. People want to know that when they come to your office, they won’t feel uncomfortable. Research shows that many patients look for doctors who look like them when they’re looking for their care. So if you show that you’re open to receiving patients who may not look like you or come from your background, then they’re more open to actually.
Take a look at your website and email you and find out more about your practice.
Also your documents or your patient documents. So something that can be used by everyone who comes to your office, you want to consider that your patient documents are available to be translated. If necessary, you can actually get paid translators or free translators through Google to translate your patient documents.
So when people are filling out their pay your paperwork, they feel more comfortable. And please remember that just because a person. Coming from, oh, has English as a second. Language does not mean that person is illiterate in their primary language. So translating documents into Spanish can help people who are of Hispanic origin to fill out paperwork easier.
Or if they’re from Nigeria, certain different places and other communities by having your documents in those actual languages, it helps patients feel more, again at home at your practice. Feel like they’re welcome at your practice. So things like that you’d want to consider as a doctor of chiropractic. I also want to talk today about volunteering.
I think that’s really important for doctors of chiropractic to volunteer. Not only in their own communities, we tend to get out there. And I see a lots of pictures on faith, on Facebook and online of doctors, volunteering with firemen, volunteering at their schools and their communities. And that’s great for bringing in your community.
But don’t forget that you can also volunteer outside your community, that people who don’t know anything about chiropractors, or you can go to a soup kitchen, or you can go to a homeless shelter just to let people know that you’re there. And you never know people who have who are and who go to community health clinic.
They need to know who we are and what we do. They may not all be able to afford your care. But again, I think that’s another question about where we are as far as how we want to care for our communities and what we’re willing to do or willing to change in order to meet the needs of our communities. And even a little outside of our communities that causes a whole nother story.
But volunteering is a great way to get the word out about what chiropractors do and that you’re available to accept people from all over your community and even outside of your communities to will who need the care that we can provide.
So they’re all types of getting examples of Cairo practice, volunteering, and various venues. Many chiropractors tend to want to do mission trips and go to other countries. But I feel like the biggest mission trip we can ever go to is in our own areas in our own states, those communities that where people are disadvantaged or low, have lower social economic issues going on.
W they want to, they can benefit from what we do as doctors of chiropractic. So staying home and traveling to those areas where they need chiropractice to help, especially with areas with lots of health disparities, things like that in those communities need doctors or chiropractors to be willing, to volunteer and show that we are out here to help all patients, not just the upperly mobile.
Wealthier or higher middle-class socioec economic standards, but that we are here for all people in our communities. So voluntary is a very big area. I think chiropractors can make a big and take big advantage of as far as letting people know who we are and what we do chiropractic.
What I’ve also realized is that the American public health association is also has a mission statement about bringing chiropractic more into public health. We have public health communities and public health clinics where people can go to get assistance. Those who do not have insurance, or do not have the finances to pay for.
Provider go to public health community co public health county health centers. I think the biggest challenge I had when I first started practice was when I had a patient come in a family from Mexico, actually, whose daughter who definitely had an Austria, a very severe knee issue. And I could, it’s also like I’ll steal my lightest in her knee.
It was very serious. And they didn’t know who to take her to. So I call places that I would think. All kinds of patients. I call places like Emory and all these great orthopedic centers. And first of all, they said that they didn’t have insurance. They had to at least bring $500 for the initial visit.
Some centers didn’t even have a child orthopedic center. And I was so surprised. So I had to find the health department who do I contact, and I was able to find. Oh, the health department and it was an office not far from my practice and I didn’t even realize that. And I gave them the information and sent that, sent them there because the daughter needed something that was definitely outside of chiropractic care.
Cause she, she was in a very severe condition, but I, it was, I was so frustrated because. No one told me when I was in school that I needed to make sure I knew where the community health center was. How did I not know that having gone through four years of chiropractic education, that I should know where the county health department is in my community.
So that’s something I always want to tell patients to. I’m sorry to tell doctors of chiropractic know where the public health facilities are in your community. And right now, again, the public health association is looking at. Incorporate more and more of what we do as chiropractors their mission now to remote and collaborate collaboration between chiropractors and other healthcare providers or professions in the communities in order to decile, and also to disseminate public health research, to promote conservative care and community health, to support chiropractic and then to be included in public health.
So there’s some great things on the horizon for chiropractors, for us to move into more of a public. Arena to help and serve more people. So we, as doctors of chiropractics have to realize our mantra should be service, not getting rich, but serving our communities, bringing them spines that are subluxation free, taking care of our patients, no matter where they come from, whether communities they are.
That’s part of being the culturally competent chiropractor, not being afraid to take on those challenges and be the doctor that people want us. So I’d like to thank ChiroSecure. This is the last iteration for this year. I like to say happy new year to everyone. It’s been a pleasure doing this series, and I hope to see you in jail in 2022 with a new series, talking about how we, as doctors of chiropractic can better serve our communities.
Thank you. This is Dr. Charmaine Herman today.