Developing Cultural Sensitivity

Welcome to another episode of The Words Matter Podcast. As usual, thank you to all the support via Patreon – every pledge is hugely appreciated.

So I did say that the previous episode with Rob Jonah would be the last outsider episode for a while, in order to make way for the clinical reasoning series.

However, there’s time for one more and I’m delighted to squeeze this one in before Dr Roger Kerry kicks off the Clinical Reasoning Series where we talk about sciencey thinking in the context of evidence informed clinical reasoning.

So make sure you hit the subscribe button on your podcast player so you don’t miss out on what will be a brilliant collection of conversations.

On this outsider episode, I’m speaking with Dr Gita Ramdharry. Gita is a Consultant Allied Health Professional in Neuromuscular Diseases at the Queen Square Centre for Neuromuscular Diseases UCLH in London. She is an Honorary Associate Professor at UCL and a Visiting Professor at Kingston University.

She has worked as a physiotherapist since 1995 and developed a special interest in neurology early on. Gita completed a PhD in 2008 looking at walking patterns, endurance and orthotic interventions for people with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. See more about Gita’s research here.

Last year, Gita wrote a wonderful blog post on her experiences of the interaction and sometimes clash between the physiotherapy professional culture and her own mixed heritage and cultural background. The blog is titled 'Awakening to the impact of culture on how we deliver care and treat our colleagues'.

In her blog Gita talks about the challenges she perceived as student, educator and clinician in feeling like a cultural outsider in relation to physiotherapy. I’ve linked the blog in the show notes and would encourage you to have a read as it’s the perfect accompaniment to our conversation.

This is the first time that I’ve directly focused on culture and ethnicity on the Podcast and Gita provided the ideal opening to these important issues and I’ve taken so much away from listening to her experience and I am sure you will too.

Find Gita on Twitter @gitaramdharry

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