Turning the Lens Inward: Cultural Competence and Providers' Values in Health Care Decision Making

The population of older adults in the United States is growing in size and diversity, presenting challenges to health care providers and patients in the context of health care decision making (DM), including obtaining informed consent for treatment, advance care planning, and deliberations about end-of-life care options. Although existing literature addresses providers' need to attend to patients' cultural values and beliefs on these issues, less attention has been paid to how the corresponding values and beliefs of providers color the care they deliver and their assessments of older adults' DM capacity. The provider's challenge is to understand her own unacknowledged anxieties, prejudices, and fears around such charged issues as truth telling, individual agency, capacity, death and dying, and the value of life itself and address their impact on the delivery of care. A social constructivist perspective and the clinical concept of cultural countertransference are proposed as aides in achieving this awareness and improving care.