Background: Women across many ethnicities and backgrounds experience a lower quality of care compared to men, and have reported lower levels of patient satisfaction, and negative health outcomes. Women of various ethnic backgrounds often have health, cultural and religious needs during pregnancy that are not met by their care providers. While addressing patient needs is a priority, providers also face challenges in understanding, accommodating, and addressing women’s needs due to limited understanding of their cultures and available resources in caring for diverse populations.
Objective: The purpose of this study is to describe and synthesize information from the literature regarding the perceptions and experiences of healthcare providers in delivering maternity care to ethnically diverse women.
Methods: A scoping review was conducted, and database searching occurred in Ovid Medline, Ovid Embase, Ovid Emcare and Web of Science. Primary studies and literature reviews in English were included if they discussed the perspectives of healthcare providers in delivering maternity care to either ethnically diverse women, immigrant women, or a specific ethnic group of women. No time restrictions were placed on articles. Thematic analysis was applied to analyze the data, and results were reported in tabular format.
Results: A total of 11 themes were generated across findings, namely, provider-patient communication difficulties, family involvement, lack of health and health system awareness, delays in care, limited time and resources, cultural conflicts, preference for a female provider, creation of stereotypes, prejudice and superior thinking, motivation to help ethnically diverse women, and cultural sensitivity training.
Conclusion: Healthcare providers face challenges in addressing the needs of ethnically diverse women, due to resource and time limitations, lack of awareness of cultural norms, and lack of adequate cultural sensitivity training and education. Therefore, there is a need to increase the number of supports for providers as well as improve cultural sensitivity training in medical education. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / Women of different backgrounds who are pregnant or who have given birth sometimes like to practice certain cultural traditions during pregnancy and birth such as eating cultural foods, fasting, and having family involved. When healthcare providers do not know about these practices or do not have the time or resources to help women practice their cultural traditions, this can cause them and the women they care for to have conflicts. This can cause other problems which can lead to poor mental and physical health. While there is a great amount of research on women’s experiences with their health providers, there is not much research on healthcare providers’ experiences with women. To address this, a scoping review was conducted to summarize research on healthcare providers’ experiences in caring for women of diverse cultures, during and after pregnancy. This review can help bridge the gap between women’s needs and healthcare providers’ abilities in meeting them.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/27577 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Jameel, Bismah |
| Contributors | Kapiriri, Lydia, Global Health |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article |
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