The Socioeconomic, Spiritual, Lifestyle, and other Cultural Factors Associated with the Patient

 
When building a patient history, it would be essential for a nurse practitioner to take socioeconomic, spiritual, and cultural factors into consideration. The health provider should also understand that people have different cultural and religious practices influencing their daily life, health, and well-being. Thus, when interacting with a patient to obtain data to help them develop their health history, the health provider is advised to be careful of sensitive comments that would be considered offensive and can cause the patient to withhold essential healthcare information (Yevoo et al., 2018). When educating themselves on the different cultures and their specific needs, a competent and fortunate healthcare provider can offer competent care to people from other cultures. Culturally capable healthcare providers can adjust to the unique needs of patients from various cultural backgrounds and develop a trusting relationship between healthcare providers and patients. To form a trusting provider-patient working relationship, the healthcare has to be knowledgeable of the patient’s specific culture. To succeed a positive patient outcome, avoiding pigeonholes would be essential. From the case study, it is a 54-year-old Caucasian male referred to the nurse practitioner’s clinic for treatments having been hospitalized due to seizer he suffered from alcohol withdrawal. Seizure is a transient occurrence of signs and symptoms due to abnormal excessive and synchronous neuronal activity in the brain (Falco-Walter et al., 2018). Experiencing two or more seizures at least 24 hours apart with an unknown cause is usually considered epilepsy, and from the case study, it is clear that the man is homeless, suffering from hypertension, and has a history of alcohol and cocaine abuse.

Sensitive Issues when Interacting with the Patient
As a healthcare provider, one should use the cultural assessment guidelines to obtain sensitive and essential information about the patient’s beliefs and spiritual practices, including healthcare practice and daily formalities. The NIDA-Modified ASSIST screening tool will efficiently capture information on the patient’s drug use and alcohol abuse (Oga et al., 2020). This tool enables clinicians to review different questions in determining harmful substances affecting a person’s health after consumption. During the interaction with the patient to gain information on their health and well-being, the nurse practitioner has to be careful with their choice of words so that the patient has a bad feeling about his current socioeconomic condition. The nurse practitioner is advised to be careful when asking the patient culturally sensitive questions and communicate in a way that makes the patient provide all the necessary information needed for building the patient’s health history (Pun et al., 2018). Some of the targeted questions to build his health history and assess his health risk include asking how he would describe his physical condition and well-being and what spirituality means to him. The next question to ask the patient would be asking him about how he carries out his spiritual beliefs, including how he would describe his cultural practice and how he ended up abusing drugs. Lastly, it would be essential to ask the patient to state the things he has done to overcome drug abuse and how he supports himself in the current lifestyle finally, ask him if he feels sad and depressed at times, and if so, how often does it happen and how do he overcome sadness and depression. Such questions would be essential for a healthcare provider to develop a patient’s health history and assess their health risk.

Conclusion
Diversity is when a healthcare facility’s medical and administrative staff represent a wide range of experience and backgrounds, where in healthcare, it ensures that all backgrounds and perspectives are adequately represented in the medical industry, and provides the best available patient care. The patient suffered from a seizure and also had hypertension; at the same time, he was homeless. The nurse practitioner is advised to be careful when asking the patient culturally sensitive questions and communicate in a way that makes the patient provide all the necessary information needed for building the patient’s health history where they would use the NIDA-Modified ASSIST screening tool, which enables a healthcare provider to go through different questions identifying substances which may be harmful to the patient.

 

References
Falco-Walter, J. J., Scheffer, I. E., & Fisher, R. S. (2018). The new definition and classification of seizures and epilepsy. Epilepsy research, 139, 73-79. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eplepsyres.2017.11.015