Further Reflections from Common Ground: Cultural Awareness in Healthcare.

Lincoln, B.

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 351 pages.

How comfortable are YOU when you are assigned to provide care to patients whose cultures, abilities, values, preferences, and lifestyles are very different from your own? Diversity characterizes our patients' ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation, ability/disability status and their lifestyles. Our society-and our home healthcare patients-are becoming ever more diverse. Would you like to feel more comfortable and competent when providing care to patients who are very different from you?

Beth Lincoln's Further Reflections from Common Ground: Cultural Awareness in Healthcare may be your next step in your journey to become an outstanding home healthcare clinician. The book, published in 2017 by CreateSpace, is moderately priced at $25, and a Kindle version is also available. The book has a number of unique features, which make it enjoyable to read while stimulating transformative change in the reader.

The most compelling feature of the book are the 13 chapters (out of 22), dedicated to a patient's story. Some of these chapters tell the stories of patients who are ethnically and religiously diverse, and other chapters tell the stories of people who may be different from us because they are deaf, homeless, prisoners, gang members, or a member of the LGBT community. In these stories, the patients face many particularly challenging health problems (e.g., autism, alcoholism, obesity, terminal care, and other difficult health issues). These 13 stories keep the reader asking, "and then what happened? ...and then what did the clinician do?" Readers will find themselves asking, "How would I intervene in this situation?" The author skillfully weaves reflective questions throughout the stories that enhance knowledge, build skills, and encourage accepting attitudes toward patients who are different from the reader. The author seeks to help clinicians recognize that clinicians and their patients stand on "common ground."

Further Reflections from Common Ground: Cultural Awareness in Healthcare can help home healthcare educators, quality improvement specialists, and administrators provide effective cultural competence orientation and in-service modules, which will raise patient satisfaction scores. But mostly I highly recommend this book to individual clinicians interested in providing the best care possible for their patients.