Importance of Cultural Competence in Infectious Disease Outbreaks

Cultural competence is important when public health practitioners need to address infectious disease outbreaks in cross-cultural communities. For this assignment, you must demonstrate an understanding of the community. Do not provide a generic response. It must be specific and detailed in the information and how you will apply cultural competence in the given situation.

Scenario

The lack of cultural competence in the recent Ebola epidemic of 2014-2016 in West Africa has been implicated as a reason that the outbreak was not contained sooner. If you were a public health practitioner responding to this outbreak, how would you include cultural norms and leaders in how you communicate with the community in order to control and prevent the disease from spreading?

Please be concise in your writing and keep the page length under 5 pages total. Follow APA formatting for a research paper. Please include references.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.