Tanenbaum’s Religious Diversity in Health Care program has been on the go recently! On October 19th, Mark Fowler, Tanenbaum’s Director of Programs presented two posters at the Seventh National Conference on Quality Health Care for Culturally Diverse Populations, also known as Diversity Rx: 2010 in Baltimore, Maryland.
The first poster “To Pray or not to Pray – Religio-Cultural Competency and the Provider-Patient Relationship” discussed the issue of prayer and proselytizing in health care. This poster gave some helpful tips on how to avoid proselytizing and address prayer requests from patients. A nurse who used the interactive feature of our poster, “Is it proselytizing if…” recognized that while she wouldn’t have thought so before, she was indeed proselytizing by offering prayer to patients – possibly making the patients uncomfortable. She said “Now, this is something I can pay attention to.”