The Heritage Assessment Tool

The Purpose of Understanding Heritage The purpose of this paper is to explore the Hispanic, Filipino, and Caucasian cultural beliefs of health traditions, promotion, maintenance, and restoration of health. Explained later are several different families whose different health traditions are influenced by their perception of their own cultural heritage. The evaluation of these different cultures reveals similarities and differences in traditions within heritage groups that express a wider cultural awareness and understanding. The true definition of cultural awareness is an understanding between individual attitudes to health and other cultural principles (Cultural awareness, n.d). To care for culturally different people one must be culturally competent. Cultural competence refers to knowledge and understanding that must be fully comprehended to care for culturally different people (Spector, 2008). Cultural assessments allow for comprehension of what people may believe according to their heritage. The major point in using assessment tools like The Heritage Assessment Tool should be the understanding that the assessment is only a baseline. Not all people fit in one category. For example, a large family unit as is

The Heritage Assessment Tool is supposed to discover all of the cultural characteristics of individuals. This tool helps one to respect the role cultural awareness plays in health. A person’s heritage will always play a role in the health decisions. This tools should be used as a baseline in understanding a persons identified cultural group. (In today’s society, social and cultural groups are more mixed than ever, and many external factors exist swaying the public’s opinions, behaviors, and attitudes. As such, one group may not in turn subscribe to the standard health care beliefs and practices of that group’s past.