Both Amish and African American cultural heritage is characterized by a set of cultural beliefs that shape their members’ experiences and define the efficacy of its delivery. The African American cultural heritage has made it possible to focus on the importance of family relationships as the vehicle for building health literacy in communities. Indeed, using the notions of connectivity within a community and the importance of family ties in African American cultural setting, nurses have been able to improve the efficacy of healthcare strategies and approaches toward managing public health issues in the African American social context. However, some of the African American cultural traditions, such as the focus on the traditional lifestyle, have served as the means of rejecting effective healthcare. Therefore, the influence that the African American heritage has had on the evolution of healthcare in the U.S. is twofold.
The refusal to utilize a range of innovative solutions by which the culture of the modern American sociocultural environment is driven deprives the Amish culture of the opportunity to participate in health education. As a result, the amount of information that the Amish culture possesses about healthcare and health management is rather scarce. Consequently, the process of delivering healthcare services to the Amish community is complicated to a considerable degree. Moreover, the refusal to utilize technological advances that American society has been using has made the Amish community very vulnerable to external health threats, reducing the opportunity of Amish people to build health literacy. While some of the aspects of the Amish culture have had a positive effect on the delivery of healthcare services, for the most part, it has impeded the introduction of Amish people to basic healthcare services.