The Big Picture
People have different backgrounds, beliefs, customs, identities, and ways of life. Respecting these differences is an important part of support work.
A CCA works with people whose experiences and beliefs may differ from their own. The goal is to respect each person as an individual and provide the same high quality of care to every client.
Care should fit the client. The CCA should not try to change the client to fit the care.
Look for Nova Scotia CCA Notes throughout this page for current provincial guidance.
Quick tip: Tap, click, or press Enter on any term with a dotted underline and an ⓘ icon to see its plain-English definition.
Start Here If You’re Overwhelmed
Focus on these core ideas:
- Diversity means different individuals and cultures coexist.
- Ethnicity and culture connect to each other, but they do not mean the same thing.
- Prejudice is an attitude or judgment. Discrimination happens when unfair treatment follows prejudice.
- Stereotypes, ageism, sexism, homophobia, racism, and ethnocentrism involve harmful assumptions, intolerance, or prejudice.
- Cultural competence means interacting effectively with people from different backgrounds.
- Cultural safety means actively creating space for cultural expression in health care.
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Course Notes: Key Ideas You Need to Know
Respect for Diversity
Diversity means different individuals and cultures coexist.
Support workers care for people with many different:
- ages
- ethnic backgrounds
- genders
- occupations
- sexual orientations
- lifestyles
- beliefs
- customs
- traditions
A support worker must respect these differences.
Clients and co-workers also have their own viewpoints. Good listening, understanding, and acceptance help the support worker work respectfully with people whose perspectives differ from their own.
CCA action: Provide the same high quality of respectful care to every client, regardless of differences.
Key fact: The support worker should adapt care and support to fit the client. The support worker should never try to change the client to fit the care.
Diversity in Canada
Canada has many cultural and ethnic groups. It is often described as a cultural mosaic or cultural salad because distinct cultures remain part of the larger country.
Canada adopted a multicultural policy in 1971 under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Multiculturalism received recognition in Section 27 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 and became law through the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1988.
Canadian multiculturalism includes equal rights, Indigenous rights, and recognition of English and French as Canada’s official languages. Other languages can also be used.
It identifies legal protection from discrimination based on:
- sex or gender
- ethnicity
- age
- sexual orientation
- language
- religion
- origin
- caste or class
- income or property
- beliefs or opinions
- health or disability
Nova Scotia CCA Note
Sorrentino’s Canadian Textbook for the Support Worker, 5th Edition gives a broad Canada-wide summary of discrimination protections. In Nova Scotia, the Human Rights Act uses a specific list of protected characteristics. The Act applies when discrimination involves a protected characteristic together with a prohibited area, such as employment, housing, services and facilities. (humanrights.novascotia.ca)
The current Nova Scotia list includes gender identity, gender expression, family status, marital status, source of income, and political belief, affiliation or activity. Nova Scotia’s list does not match Sorrentino word for word. (humanrights.novascotia.ca)
Why this matters in Nova Scotia: For provincial workplace and care-setting questions, recognize that Nova Scotia uses its own Human Rights Act and its own protected-characteristic list.
Official source: For Individuals | Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission
Last checked: September 2, 2026
Ethnicity and Culture Are Different
These two terms connect closely, so they are easy to confuse.
The term ethnicity is used instead of race because some people find race insulting or misleading. The two terms are not exact replacements.
Ethnicity
Ethnicity means sharing a common history, language, geography, national origin, religion, or identity.
An ethnic group does not have to match a person’s nationality.
For example, a person might have Canadian nationality while identifying with a Ukrainian ethnic background because of family history, language, and customs.
Ethnic identity means the ethnic background a person feels part of, usually through shared language and customs.
Culture
Culture describes shared characteristics within a group. These characteristics include:
- language
- values
- beliefs
- customs and habits
- ways of life
- rules for behaviour
- music
- traditions
People learn cultural characteristics by living within groups. These characteristics influence attitudes and behaviours.
Ethnicity influences culture, but other factors influence culture too. Age, ethnicity, gender, occupation, sexual orientation, lifestyle, and combinations of these factors influence culture.
A person belongs to more than one cultural group at the same time. Groups based on school, religion, work, activities, and other shared experiences each have their own cultural influences.
Every Person Is Culturally Unique
Ethnicity influences culture, but it is only one influence.
Two people from the same ethnic background might have different cultural experiences. Education, interests, friendships, religion, social groups, and life experiences also shape culture.
Each person responds differently to cultural influences. For this reason, each person is culturally unique.
Culture also changes over time as people enter new groups or have new life experiences.
Assimilation
To assimilate means to adopt traditions of the larger society.
A person might change clothing, eating habits, or other behaviours while living among people from another culture.
Examples include a Muslim woman who no longer wears a hijab and a First Nations person who changes eating habits.
Racism and Ethnocentrism
Racism involves superiority, intolerance, or prejudice toward people because of differences in physical appearance or cultural practices.
Ethnocentrism means believing that one’s own culture or ethnic group is better or more important than other cultures or ethnic groups.
Ethnocentrism might appear less obvious than racism. Both conflict with the respect for diversity described in this topic.
Prejudice, Bias, and Discrimination
These ideas connect, but they describe different things.
Prejudice
Prejudice is an attitude or opinion formed about a person because of their membership in a group.
The idea comes from prejudging someone. A person forms assumptions before knowing the individual.
Bias
Bias is a point of view that prevents a person from judging something impartially .
A preconceived viewpoint affects how the person sees the situation.
Discrimination
Discrimination is unfair treatment based on a person’s physical characteristics, health history, or group membership.
Acting on prejudice results in discrimination.
For example, refusing to hire one person because of a negative assumption about the person’s group represents discrimination.
Stereotypes
A stereotype is an overly simple or exaggerated view of a group.
Stereotyping happens when someone assumes everyone in a group is alike or behaves in the same way.
A broad statement about a group does not accurately describe every individual in that group.
Ageism
Ageism means impatience, intolerance, or prejudice based on negative attitudes and stereotypes about a person or group because of age.
Ageism includes two connected ideas:
- Thinking about older people through negative attitudes and stereotypes about aging.
- Structuring society as though everyone is young and failing to respond to the needs of older people.
Ageism contributes to individual age discrimination and wider discrimination in services, programs, and facilities.
Ageism can also affect health care. When health care education focuses mainly on younger adults, some health care workers may overlook serious symptoms in older people, including signs of fever, medication interactions, or urinary tract infections.
Age discrimination means treating people unequally because of age in a way that conflicts with human rights law.
The Ontario Human Rights Code provides one example. It prohibits age discrimination in areas including employment, housing, goods, services and facilities, contracts, and membership in trade and vocational associations.
Age discrimination can have the same economic, social, and psychological impact as other forms of discrimination.
Avoid Assumptions About Older People
Aging is highly individual.
A person’s age alone does not tell you that person’s skills or abilities. People should be treated as individuals and assessed on their own merits instead of through assumptions.
Combating ageism also involves raising awareness and challenging common stereotypes and misperceptions about aging.
Ageism also affects people differently depending on other parts of identity. Examples include gender, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, colour, religion, culture, and language.
Inclusive planning should reflect people of different ages instead of assuming everyone is young. Existing physical, attitudinal, and systemic barriers should be identified and removed.
Sexism
Sexism means intolerance or prejudice toward a person or group because of gender.
Examples include:
- believing men make better politicians than women
- paying men more than women for the same work
- seeking medical help to conceive a baby of a preferred gender
Homophobia and LGBTQ2
Homophobia means negative attitudes toward or intolerance of homosexuality or people identified or perceived as part of the LGBTQ2 community.
LGBTQ2 refers to people who identify as:
- lesbian
- gay
- bisexual
- transgender
- transsexual
- queer
- questioning their sexuality
- two-spirited
Discrimination against people in the LGBTQ2 community is illegal, yet discrimination still occurs.
Among Canadian children or youth who identify as part of the LGBTQ2 community, more than half reported verbal harassment related to perceived gender or sexual orientation. Over 20% reported physical harassment or assault.
Transgender and Cisgender
Transgender describes a person whose personal identity and gender do not correspond to the person’s sex at birth or do not conform to conventional ideas about sex and gender.
Cisgender describes a person whose personal identity corresponds with the sex and gender assigned at birth or with their birth sex.
These terms describe different relationships between personal identity, gender, and sex at birth.
Cultural Conflict
Cultural conflict involves negative feelings or behaviour when people from one culture try to impose their values or behaviours on people from another culture.
Cultural conflict might occur when someone tries to decide what another person’s culture should be.
Examples include forcing people to hide signs of religious affiliation or giving a client foods based on the caregiver’s culture rather than the client’s culture.
Cultural conflict also occurs within one individual who lives within different cultures at the same time.
For example, a person raised in a modest religious family might experience conflict between family expectations and the freedoms found within a different peer group.
Cultural Competence
Cultural competence means interacting effectively with people from different cultural, gender, or socioeconomic backgrounds .
In health care, it includes respectful care that responds to a client’s:
- health beliefs
- practices
- language needs
Cultural competence includes learning about different cultures.
It also means respecting the client without trying to change the client’s values or beliefs.
Key fact: People from the same culture do not all have identical health practices. Cultural competence requires avoiding assumptions about a client’s beliefs or behaviours.
Cultural Safety
Cultural safety means actively inviting and creating space for cultural expression within health care.
Caregivers should ask families whether they want special traditions or practices included in care and offer appropriate examples.
Cultural competence and cultural safety both support respectful, person-centred care.
Nova Scotia CCA Note
Sorrentino teaches cultural competence and cultural safety. Nova Scotia’s current Continuing Care Assistant Occupational Standards of Practice also name cultural humility as an essential skill. Cultural humility involves self-reflection to understand personal and systemic biases and privilege, with the goal of building respectful relationships based on mutual trust. The standards also expect CCAs to show cultural sensitivity and value diversity and inclusivity. (novascotiacca.ca)
This does not replace cultural competence or cultural safety. It adds current Nova Scotia CCA terminology to recognize alongside them. The Occupational Standards are used to shape the provincial CCA Program and CCA Certification Exam. (novascotiacca.ca)
Why this matters in Nova Scotia: Cultural humility is part of current provincial CCA occupational language, so it has study value when reviewing professional behaviours, respectful care, and provincial CCA competencies.
Official source: Continuing Care Assistant Occupational Standards of Practice (CCA OSoP)
Last checked: September 2, 2026
Supporting a Culturally Competent Workplace
Support workers help create a culturally competent workplace through their own behaviour and interactions with others.
CCA actions:
- Be aware of unconscious bias .
- Think before making jokes or comments that might insult or hurt someone.
- Discourage biased terminology in the workplace.
- Try to advocate for people who may not feel able to speak for themselves.
- Celebrate holidays of all cultures and try to learn about other cultures.
- Make care teams as diverse as possible.
- Respectfully ask for clarification when unsure.
- Ask a person to repeat something respectfully when communication is unclear.
- Pay attention to nonverbal expressions during communication.
Exam Clue Words
- Must: A support worker must respect people’s differences and perspectives.
- Never: The support worker should never try to change the client to fit the care. Care should adapt to the client.
- Regardless: Every client should receive the same high quality of care regardless of differences.
- Avoid: Avoid prejudging a client’s beliefs or behaviours based on cultural background.
- Respectfully: When communication is unclear, respectfully ask for clarification or repetition.
Common Mix-Ups
| Wrong Idea | Better Idea |
|---|---|
| Ethnicity and culture mean the same thing. | Ethnicity is one influence on culture. Culture has many other influences. |
| Prejudice and discrimination are identical. | Prejudice is an attitude. Acting on prejudice results in discrimination. |
| Everyone from one culture behaves the same way. | Each person is culturally unique. |
| A stereotype accurately describes every group member. | A stereotype is an overly simple or exaggerated view of a group. |
| Cultural competence means changing the client’s beliefs. | Cultural competence includes respecting the client’s values and beliefs. |
Fast Review
Focus on the terms and differences that are easiest to mix up.
- Diversity means different individuals and cultures coexist.
- Ethnicity involves shared history, language, geography, national origin, religion, or identity.
- Culture includes shared language, values, beliefs, customs, habits, ways of life, behaviour rules, music, and traditions.
- Some people belong to more than one culture, and a person’s culture can change through new groups and life experiences.
- Prejudice is an attitude formed about someone because of group membership. Acting on prejudice results in discrimination.
- Bias prevents impartial judgment. A stereotype gives an overly simple or exaggerated view of a group.
- Ageism involves negative attitudes, stereotypes, impatience, intolerance, or prejudice based on age.
- Sexism involves intolerance or prejudice based on gender. Homophobia involves negative attitudes toward or intolerance of homosexuality or people identified or perceived as LGBTQ2.
- Cultural conflict occurs when people try to impose their cultural values or behaviours on others. It also occurs within a person living between different cultures.
- Cultural competence means interacting effectively with people from different cultural, gender, or socioeconomic backgrounds.
- Cultural safety means actively creating space for cultural expression in health care.
- A support worker should respect differences, avoid assumptions, communicate respectfully, and adapt care to the client rather than trying to change the client.
Final Pep Talk
This topic has many terms that sound similar, so focus on the differences between them. Review the pairs that are easiest to confuse, especially ethnicity and culture, prejudice and discrimination, and cultural competence and cultural safety.