Cross Cultural Communication By DR PREM JAGYASI
Many people travel across the boundaries to avail medical care and treatment, so it is important to understand the cultural needs and beliefs of the place you choose to visit. As a potential medical tourist, you need to make sure many things while planning your medical journey. It is essential to understand the cultural values of a particular nation before planning a medical trip to a foreign country.
Investigating and gathering all important information about the region you are visiting could be very useful as you might come across many differences between the cultures of the home country and the host. These cultural differences may or may not suit you and might make many changes to your desired or planned medical journey. In this article, we will discuss the various factors a medical tourist needs to take into consideration:
- In medical tourism, the understanding of cultural issues is a two-way process. The host country needs to be aware of the patient’s cultural beliefs and a potential medical tourist should understand the culture of the destination country.
- Most medical tourists are traveling across the boundaries to receive quality medical or wellness care at affordable prices, there is a great need for two-sided cultural understanding. The diversity in culture may occur due to the differences in geography, nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, and language.
- The religion, clothing, food, and lifestyle play an important role in understating the cultural values of a particular region or a country. The cultural needs of people varies religion to religion for example, cultural needs of a Muslim patient could be entirely different from that of Hindu and Christian patient.
- A clear and complete understanding of the cultural values and beliefs can help achieve higher satisfaction. As patients coming from different geographies may have varied cultural beliefs. Therefore, it is very important for them to understand the value and cultural beliefs of their medical tourism destination.
In this video, Dr Prem shares some more insights on How to communicate across cultures. Watching this video will give yourself the best chance of delivering a memorable, clear communication.