Providing Culturally Appropriate Health Care in the Haitian Context
I recently came across a document I wrote years ago as part of a training for ex-pat health workers at the Hopital Justinien in Cap Haitian. It concerns how to provide health services to Haitians. I wrote it for two reasons. First, cultural misunderstandings in a medical context can have serious consequences. Second, I was bothered when I would sometimes hear expat health care providers complain about how hard it was to work with Haitians - as if there were something wrong with them. Quite the contrary. To be an effective provider, one has to know his/her own culture as well as that of the patient.