Introduction
On Wednesday, 12 December 2012, the conspicuous image of the first Sikh to guard Buckingham Palace was used by a few newspapers to illustrate England’s increasingly multi-racial society in the wake of the 2011 Census findings which had revealed two important facts:13 per cent of people currently living in England and Wales had been born abroad For the time ever, less than 90 per cent of the country was white. (BBC,2014)

Cultural diversity and pluralism have become essential parts of the socio-economic engine that drives the country, and their impact at this time has considerable connotations and give rise to the question, "How will a healthcare professional cope with this increasingly plural society?".

What is Culture? Spencer-Oatey (2012) asserts that culture has always been difficult to define citing the work of the American anthropologists, Kroeber and Kluckhohn, who compiled a list of 164 different definitions in 1952.
The most apt definition I have come across is that proposed by Hofstede (1994, p.5), ‘[Culture] is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.’
From this definition, it can be surmised that a culture's existence is utterly dependent on its adherents being totally unquestioning of it and very enthusiastic about passing its fundamentals on to the next generation.

What is Professionalism?
The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines professionalism as "the skill, good judgment, and polite behaviour that is expected from a person who is trained to do a job well". In modern nursing, the framework for professionalism was set by Florence Nightingale who was totally committed to giving herself to others and respected the rights and dignity of all patients.
Potter et al (2013) describe nursing as a caring discipline, whose values are rooted in helping people to regain, maintain, or improve health; prevent illness; and find comfort and dignity.
In today's multicultural society, it has become more common to interact with individuals from other cultures and Spector (2013, p.4) asserts that now more than ever, it is imperative for healthcare providers to become informed about and sensitive to the culturally diverse subjective meanings of health, illness, caring, and curing/healing practices.

Impact of culture on professionalism
From birth, each human begins learning the beliefs and practices of the culture he or she has been born into, and over time becomes so assimilated into that culture that actions are often carried out without conscious thought. In other words, the response of people to external stimuli depends upon the set of ideas and attitudes—the culture—that they have been socialized into by the society and/or the particular social group they were raised within. (Inglis, 2005)
It thus follows that if the culture of an individual can have a definite and profound effect on how he or she not only interacts with others, it will surely affect how he or she relates to a healthcare system.
For a healthcare professional to understand the impact of culture on professional practice, a start will be to understand the components of culture. Culture consists of values, beliefs, underlying assumptions, attitudes, and behaviour and Inglis (2005) states that someone brought up in one cultural context could respond to a particular thing or situation in a manner somewhat or indeed very different from someone brought up in another cultural context.

Culture is such a vast topic and for the purpose of brevity, this essay will focus on religion - as an aspect of culture - and its impact on treatment and dietary needs.

Religion
Different cultures have various ways of explaining what causes illness, how it - the illness - can be cured or treated, and who should be involved in the process. In Western societies such as the United Kingdom, disease is usually seen as arising from natural phenomena, and the usual response is to