This book addresses health professions educational challenges specific
to non-Western cultures, implementing a shifting paradigm for educating
future health professionals towards patient-centered care. While health
professions education has received increasing attention in the last
three decades, promoting student-centered learning principles pioneered
by leaders in the medical community has, for the most part, remain
rooted in the Western context. Building from Hofstede's analysis of the
phenomena of cultural dimensions, which underpin the way people build
and maintain their relationships with others and influence social,
economic, and political well-being across nations, this book demarcates
the different cultural dimensions between East and West, applied to
medical education. The respective 'hierarchical' and 'collectivist'
cultural dimensions are unpacked in several studies stemming from
non-western countries, with the capacity to positively influence
healthcare education and services. The book provides new insights for
researchers and health professional educators to understand how cultural
context influences the input, processes, and output of health
professionals' education. Examples include how cultural context
influences the ways in which students respond to teachers, how teachers
giving feedback to students, and the challenges of peer feedback and
group work. The authors also examine causes for student hesitation in
proposing ideas, the pervasive cultural norm of maintaining harmony, the
challenges of teamwork in clinical settings, the need to be sensitive to
community health needs, the complexity of clinical decision making, and
the challenge of how collectivist cultural values play into group
dynamics. This book aims to advocate a more culturally-sensitive
approach to educating health professionals, and will be relevant to both
students and practitioners in numerous areas of public health and
medical education.
