Effects of cultural shock on foreign health care professionals: An analysis of key factors

Abstract

Rakesh Guru, Muhammad A Siddiqui, Zeeshan Ahmed, Adeel Ahmed Khan

This review is based upon the foreign health care professionals (FHCP) who go to various developed countries (United Kingdom, United States of America, Australia, Germany and France) from developing countries (India, Pakistan, Africa, Philippines etc) for work to have a better life style, good income, more opportunities, but experienced cultural shock with other types of problem. “Cultural shock” is the mixture of anxiety and feelings of confusion, excitement and insecurity and each person feels itdifferently. To explore this topic in depth, we dividedthe topic into separate themes to achieve maximum knowledge that followed by reflection, recommendations and conclusion. FHCP generally feel the unfamiliar environment when they visit to a completelydifferent culture in a foreign country and feel certain problems (familial, professionals, technical etc.) along with cultural shock. Following these findings, we have identified three themes: The first theme will discuss about the cultural shock among FHCP and its impact. The second theme will be a focus on different issues of FHCP about their failure or struggle due to culture shock and third theme which is management challenges in order to establish appropriate culture in organization. For this review, we searched and selected various peer reviewed articles online using search engines and databases including Medline, Scopus, Cinahl and Cochrane and books from the University of Northampton library and peer reviewed journals including International Journalof Intercultural Relations, Human Resources for Health, British Medical Journal and Bulletin of The World Health Organization as well. This review will help to explore different aspects of FHCP such as adjustment with entirely different culture, lack of experience, different lifestyles, face problems being immigrants, and working in a completely different setup with certain rules and regulations.