Why Do Culture and Perspective Matter?

00:05 So when we think about culture and perspective, why do culture and perspective matter? Because we all have different lived experiences.

00:14 And I'm going to talk about that, just to teach you how to recognize when you're making a judgement based on your lived experiences, and might not always align with reality.

00:26 So culture and perspective matter, because they shape the way we see everything.

00:31 So in everything we do, it's based on those influences that I'll talk about a little bit more.

00:37 But there are multiple things that shape who we become.

00:40 This is one of my ultimate favorite quotes too that I'm going to mention next is that, we don't see things as they are necessarily.

00:48 We see them as we are.

00:50 Kind of brings their whole concept together.

00:52 And what we want to do is get to a space where we see things from a global perspective, not just our own.

00:59 Doesn't mean giving up who you are.

01:01 It doesn't mean changing your ways all the time.

01:04 But how can I think about my ways of being and other people's ways of being and be flexible, so that we can respect each other, and get along, even in a space where we disagree.

01:17 So getting to a place where we can agree to disagree and just have a shared understanding.

01:22 So that takes us defining, culture.

01:27 There are so many different definitions of culture, but some of the key words are shared beliefs, values, assumptions, and behaviors.

01:36 And I mentioned already our ways of being so a way of life and some features of how we exist in a certain time or place.

01:43 Then also, you didn't hear anything in those first two definitions about material traits or physical traits at all.

01:52 But that's also another part of the definition of culture.

01:55 So from a racial, religious, or social group, social forms, beliefs, I like to give examples of that based on in nursing.

02:04 We have several different disciplines within that discipline.

02:09 And so when I talk about that.

02:10 I mean, we have RNs.

02:12 We have RNs who have associate degrees.

02:14 We have RNs with bachelor's, master's, PhD, and DNPs.

02:19 All of them we have we share certain things, certain beliefs, right.

02:22 Just like these definitions.

02:24 Say, we have certain ways of being that align with each other.

02:27 When we think about all the other disciplines in terms of nurse practitioners, or nurse anesthetists.

02:34 So we all have basic training and beliefs that are the same.

02:38 But then we have some differences in terms of what are actual professional roles are.

02:44 Taking that a little deeper.

02:45 Thinking about all the different units in a hospital system.

02:49 So we have Med Surg, we have NICU, PICU, all these things.

02:54 Again, we have foundational things that we share.

02:57 However, if I work in Med Surg, and I get pulled to PICU.

03:02 There's a different culture in PICU.

03:05 So I know how to do a basic assessment on a child because I was taught that.

03:09 However, the way I see you functions, is completely different from how Med Surg functions.

03:15 So I don't want to go into ICU and try to impose all the things we do in Med Surg on people in ICU and vice versa.

03:23 If you get pulled from ICU to Med Surg, you want to be able to adapt to how they do things on those units, because that has been already proven to be best practices in that unit in order to safely care for patients.

03:38 So just thinking that even though we have a lot of things in common, we can think about that broadly.

03:44 And in the space of healthcare, there are differences.

03:47 And if we take it even further and think about nurses, physicians, PAs, PTs, no matter what discipline you work on, we're all part of a team.

03:57 So we have to be able to work together with the overall vision of making sure patients are safely cared for.

04:03 And going back to that, what is the optimal outcome for that patient? And so cultural intelligence helps us to think about just because something is done different in your discipline, or in your unit, doesn't make it wrong in the other unit, but we should all be able to talk about how we can work together, focusing on what the overall vision is? If we take that outside of the healthcare space, and we go back to talking about social justice and inclusive excellence, then we're talking about how do we not try to change to other people or how do we embrace differences to make something good and better happen?