Poster

With an ever-diversifying population, health care providers must understand that culture has a large impact on their patient's prior perceptions of healthcare, including their trust or mistrust of the provider and what their practices. This impact spreads to an individual's health choices, response to therapy and treatment, and how they seek care. Therefore, intercultural communication plays a significant role in providing the best possible healthcare. Despite this, there is little policy in teaching and enforcing cultural competency for many health care providers, especially physicians. This research aimed to explore how the communicative experiences of Spanish-speaking individuals living in the U.S. with their physicians affected their wellbeing. In this project, a phenomenological approach was used to gain a better understanding of the participant's experiences. A preliminary survey and an in-depth interview were used to gather our data. It was revealed that the cultural value of personalismo, the value of personal relationships, is one of the most important values to Spanish-speaking patients when selecting a physician. A lack of personalismo often results in changing or not seeking medical help. The data also revealed that the participants were unaware of navigating the American health system and general health information, thus making them more prone to health care disparities. The results of this study provide much-needed information on the importance of physicians to understand the cultural background of their patients and learn good cultural competency. The results further bring attention to the continuing complexities of delivering health care to people from diverse cultural backgrounds in the U.S.