Jeff Agency Service Delivery Case Study

Jeff Agency Service Delivery: The Role of Diversity Awareness and Multiculturalism in Meeting Human Needs
Requitta McGhee
Kaplan University

Jeff has recently moved to a new city. Jeff is a human service professional, who just landed a job in his field at a community mental Agency. Jeff is fluently in Spanish and has worked with culturally diverse groups. The agency he is currently working at receives Latino/clients who are court ordered to receive mental health services.
At the Agency there is one Latina therapist and the rest of the staff is white. Jeff believes the agency maybe displaying some concerns due to institutional racism. Institutional racism is defined as racism perpetrated by government entities as a school, the

This is because people of color have for many years watched their children being placed in remedial classrooms or tracked as retarded on the basis of IQ testing and seen loved ones diagnosed as suffering from serious mental disorders because of their performance on various personality test (Diller,2015).
Reynolds and Kaiser (1980) list several factors that can contribute to cultural bias in testing. In short, it is very difficult to ensure fairness in psychological testing across cultures, and practitioners should exert real care in drawing conclusion based exclusively on test scores.
The bias of service at Jeff’s agency could be intentional or unintentional such as racial microggressions. Bias can also be unintentionally introduced into the therapeutic relationships through the unexamined altitudes of human service providers. Jeff expressed all the negative comments that have been made by some of the therapists about Latino/ a clients at the agency

For Hispanics coming to America there are number of stressors that are likely to be pervasive, intense, and lifelong. Jeff’s agency’s counselors need to learn the realty of the Hispanic Immigrants and help them adapt to these stressors. The most common and problematic consequences of acculturation is the breakdown of traditional cultural and family norms. It is critical to be familiar with the norms of the groups and subgroups of which the agency clients are members of (Diller, 2015).
I suggest that Jeff’s agency keeps in mind that Latino culture is very diverse. Before going to an outside source they will turn to their own extended family and then their church. With the agency having mostly court order clients it’s probably hard for them to deal with not being able to seek help the way they are used to so they are very close minded. In relation to mental health services, the less likely they are to look for mental health treatment. Overall Latinos are not open to any mental health approaches (Diller,