CULTURAL PERCEPTIONS AND MISCONCEPTIONS
This chapter is written from the point of view of doctors working in Britain with patients from other cultures, rather than about doctors who work abroad. This author’s experience as a general practitioner working with recent immigrants in Tower Hamlets, a deprived inner city area of London, will illustrate the most obvious problems of cultural diversity. The fact that most of the indigenous patients are Cockney, and have a distinct language as well as cultural tradition concerning such things as food and commerce, demonstrates that the problems are not only to do with racial issues. It is this author’s proposition that when working with individual patients it is just as easy to overemphasize the influence of culture as it is to be insensitive. To be able to provide the best service to patients doctors need to be able to judge the importance of all the influences surrounding a doctor/patient relationship. If we are skilled in analysing the emotional climate within our relationships with patients, we will not be so greatly daunted by the constraining effects of external differences. Before trying to understand the effect of some of those differences on the provision of care in Britain, we need to look briefly at the situation in the countries from which many of Britain’s recent immigrants have come.
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