Allied health professionals are confronted with different death and dying practices. An effective allied health professional recognizes the importance of understanding different cultural practices, and learns how to evaluate the death, dying, and spiritual beliefs and practices across the cultures.
Read the case histories: Chapter 14, “Stories of Shanti: Culture and Karma,” by Gelfland, Raspa, and Sherylyn, from End-of-Life Stories: Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries (2005), from the GCU Library.
Identify your role as a health care professional in supporting Shanti’s dying rituals, and in creating strategies for displaying respect while still providing quality care. Identify communication strategies necessary in caring for your select person. Integrate your strategies as you develop a care plan describing how you would approach the situation and care for the patient. Review the “Care Plan” template prior to beginning.
Include the following in your care plan:
Communication: family and patient
Treatment options that align with the specific culture
Education: family and patient

Family roles in the process
Spiritual beliefs
Barriers
Cultural responses
Any additional components that you feel would need to be addressed (from your perspective as a health care professional)
CHAPTER 14
Stories of Shanti:
Culture and Karma
The body’s life proceeds not lacking Work. There is a task of
holiness to do.
—Bhagavad Gita Chapter III
Shanti’s Story
Copyright © 2005. Springer Publishing Company, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
Ardith Z. Doorenbos
When I met Shanti, she was already a very ill 64 year old woman.
I was called in as an advisor, as I had worked as a nurse in India
and had insight into Shanti’s cultural concerns. Her breast cancer
had spread to numerous other sites in her body. She was suffering
with anorexia and weight loss, digestive problems, headaches, and
pain in her shoulders, chest, hips, and back; she grimaced when
she moved; she had shortness of breath and a persistent cough.
She did not know she had cancer, or how ill she really was, nor
did she want to know. “It is in the hands of the gods,” she asserted.
Shanti was a soft-spoken, gentle woman, and it disturbed the hospice staff to see her in constant, aching pain, yet refusing to take
pain medication.
Shanti had lived in the United States for 32 years, and her
family still adhered strictly to the Hindu beliefs and practices from
their early lives in India. She was in an arranged marriage, and
her three children, although all born in the United States, were
also in successful arranged marriages. Shanti and her husband were
upset because their son did not live with them because of job177
End-Of-Life Stories : Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries, edited by Donald E. Gelfand, et al., Springer Publishing
Company, Incorporated, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gcu/detail.action?docID=423235.
Created from gcu on 2024-04-30 01:52:05.