Beyond Translation: What Cultural Competency Really Looks Like in Practice
It’s not just about speaking Spanish. It’s not just about knowing the right dishes or celebrating the right holidays. Cultural competency is deeper than that.
It’s about understanding how people see health, how they carry fear or pride, how they make decisions, and who they trust. It’s about knowing that one person might ignore their diagnosis because they don’t want to worry their family, while another might go along with a treatment plan they don’t fully understand just to be polite. It’s about recognizing that faith, gender roles, immigration experiences, and family dynamics all shape how people engage with care.
At Cercanos, we’ve learned that cultural competency is not a checklist. It’s a relationship. It’s listening without judgment. It’s noticing what someone doesn’t say. It’s building trust slowly and showing up consistently. It’s adapting the care plan not just to the patient, but to their reality.
When our team works with a patient, we don’t just offer care in their language. We meet them in their world. That means asking questions about who cooks in the house. About who makes medical decisions. About whether they can talk openly when others are in the room. It means adjusting medication instructions based on routines, and meal plans based on what’s affordable and familiar.
We know that in many hispanic households, health is not individual, it’s shared. Family matters. The way we explain a diagnosis or coach through behavior change often involves more than one person. So we include them. We make sure husbands, wives, adult children, and abuelitas understand the plan and know how to help.
Cultural competency in practice looks like flexibility. It looks like humility. It looks like presence. At Cercanos, it looks like a coach asking if a patient feels comfortable speaking freely before starting a virtual visit, especially when family is in the background. It looks like adjusting a diabetes care plan because the patient cooks for a big family and needs meals that everyone will eat. It looks like a nurse recognizing that a patient may be hesitant to discuss mental health and finding gentle ways to talk about stress. It looks like noticing when someone avoids video visits and offering phone calls instead, because they feel more natural. It looks like sending reminders in the tone and language that feel most familiar, and following up with warmth, not scripts.
And when we get it right, patients lean in. They ask more questions. They share more honestly. They trust. And that trust leads to better outcomes.
Because the best care doesn’t just speak your language. It speaks to your life.