Culture in Healing – Healing in Culture

Culture in Healing – Healing in Culture

Rationale:

The quality of the relation connecting the health worker to the patient is an important element of the healing process. The cultural distance separating the two often creates an invisible bias producing unnecessary tensions, compromising successful patient- professional cooperation. Minorities and migrants are often cited as obvious examples of cultural otherness; it is less readily recognised that patients coming simply from different social contexts than that of the majority population might also pose problems to the medical system.

Aim of the seminar:

to introduce and discuss a method based on the work of French social psychologist Margalit Cohen- Emerique to increase self-consciousness and self-reflection of health professionals being able to cope with intercultural issues. A conceptional framework and important keys will be given to understand better cultural patterns different from theirs, in order to render their work more efficient and less contentious.