foundation of nursing education

Question: Choose one nursing theory and explain its relevance to nursing practice by presenting its key points through the different phases of the nursing process.

Today, nurses are becoming sensitive to and knowledgeable about cultural differences and similarities in people’s care. They must recognize the values of all cultures, races and ethnic groups and respond to these differences. Increasing diversity and mobility of society accentuate an important need for professional nurses to render holistic, culturally competent nursing care. To be culturally competent, nurses must first be culturally aware and sensitive. Nurses are awaking to the critical need to become more knowledgeable and culturally competent to work with individuals from diverse cultures.

The assessment step of the nursing process is extremely important in inter ethnic relationships between patients and nurses. To gather data about a patient of a culture different from the nurse's, the nurse needs to view the patient in the contexts within which he exists. For instance, as proposed by Giger and Davidhizer (1991), there are six cultural phenomena that affect health care and communication is one. Regarding the communication measure, miscommunication is a frequent problem in hospitals. The most obvious is when the patient and hospital staff does not speak the same language. There are often terms that others use which have different meanings to them. It is very important for nurses to be understood by patients especially during health teachings for cooperation and collaboration, thus resulting to an effective nursing care. But the more subtle problems are those that result from cultural differences in meanings of non-verbal behavior. Many Asians consider it disrespectful to look someone directly in the eye, especially if that person is a nurse, not because of disinterest or dishonesty. An Asian patient may avoid eye contact out of respect for the superior status of the nurse. Many Middle Easterners see direct eye contact between a man and a woman as a sexual invitation. Knowing what is the norm within the culture will facilitate understanding and lessen miscommunication. Nursing diagnosis related to these may be one of the following: Anxiety, Impaired Verbal Communication, Decisional Conflict, Ineffective Health Maintenance, Deficient Knowledge, and/or Ineffective Role Performance. When planning nursing care as for Impaired Verbal Communication diagnosis as an example, together with our gathered data through assessment, if the patient speaks a different language, we should ask another person such as his/her significant others to translate what the patient should know or will be done to him/her. With this, the patient should be able to understand, recap and participate in therapeutic nursing care. What we need to do to make sure that our patients will be able to understand us can be establishing effective means of communication such as writing, translating through significant others, the use of simple/ layman terms, facilitating hearing and vision examinations to identify the cause and address it. In this way, we would be able to have an appropriate response to interventions/ teaching and/or actions performed. We could also identify the need for any modifications with our nursing care through proper communication.
It is essential for the health professional to utilize knowledge gained from conceptual and theoretical models of culturally appropriate care. Communication is just one of the six cultural phenomena and it is very vital to understand each and one of them to render holistic care to our patients.