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With the aging of many populations, health care workers and families increasingly find themselves jointly involved in situations involving decisions about nursing home placements. How each approaches such situations is affected by beliefs and assumptions about the role of family members in the care of family members and the decision making process. This paper explores the responses of people from four cultural groups living in Australia (Anglo-Celtic Australian, Chinese, Greek, Lebanese) to a critical incident scenario about a Russian family in Australia faced with such a decision. The responses to this scenario were remarkably similar across the four cultural groups. All saw making such a decision as difficult, but the reasons for the difficulty suggest some interesting cross-cultural distinctions. Some groups viewed care of a family member more in terms of a social and role obligation while others addressed it as a personal responsibility. To not care for elderly parents in the home was accompanied by a sense of guilt among some respondents and a sense of public social shame among others. Ambivalence about nursing homes and placing a family member in a nursing home, culture change and cross-generational differences, and roles and role support were other important themes. The results are consistent with other data analysed in conjunction with the Intercultural Interaction Project. The findings from this research suggests a need to examine more closely the beliefs and assumptions associated with nursing home placements and one way to help students and health professionals to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is a growing familiarity with the concept of 'culture,' there are inconsistencies in its definition and use. Furthermore, culture has become a ready, but not necessarily accurate, explanation for many problems in health care settings. We suggest that one reason the attention to culture has not had a greater impact on the quality of health care is because many have an inadequate understanding of the concept. This paper presents an analysis of 86 occupational therapists' and 20 physiotherapists' definitions. It explores how practicing therapists define and articulate the concept, and it compares their definitions with those from health science students discussed in an earlier paper published in this journal. Our analyses suggest that although both groups tend to use a materialist definition, there are differences in their understandings of culture. We considered three potential explanations: methodological; differences in the occupational roles of students and therapists; and historical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concepts of culture and cultural issues have become a focus for the delivery of health care services in multicultural societies. While much attention has been directed towards explorations of cultural issues in health care contexts, few studies have explored understandings of the concept of culture. In this paper, we explore definitions of culture offered by a group of 715 occupational therapy, diversional therapy, and physiotherapy students in Australia. A simple content analysis of the definitions suggests that student health professionals tend to use a totalist or materialist view of culture and often confound the concept of culture with race and ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]