Madeleine Leininger's Cultural Care Diversity And Universality Theory

Nursing theory combines four common elements: the client, health, environment and nursing. Nursing theory guides nursing decisions and actions to explain a phenomenon and to give the appropriate care to a client. Madeleine Leininger incorporates all of these elements in her cultural care diversity and universality theory. She theorized and researched the importance of recognizing the client’s cultural differences and incorporating this knowledge along with caring in the client’s care. The goal of Madeleine Leininger’s cultural care diversity and universality theory is “to improve and provide care which is culturally acceptable and is beneficial and useful to the client and family” (McCance, 1999, p. 1390). In Leininger’s cultural
care diversity and universality theory, involving the client’s cultural needs in the healing process is the most important action. In her sunrise model, Leininger describes two types of care for the client, generic care and professional care. “Generic caring was the oldest form of basic expression of human caring essential for the growth, health, and survival of Homo Sapiens” (Reynolds, 1993, p. 24-25). Examples of generic caring include home remedies (these will be culturally specific) and folk care. She defines professional care as “cognitively learned, practiced, and transmitted knowledge learned through formal and informal professional education nursing schools” (Reynolds, 1993, p. 25). Examples of professional care for the nurse include how to handle both procedures and practices as well as diseases and symptoms. Leininger explains that professional care teaching does not incorporate generic care. Generic care has not been viewed as a valuable skill for client care, but does need to be taken into consideration in order to give meaningful care. “Thus the ultimate goal was to link and synthesize generic and professional care knowledge to benefit the client” (Reynolds, 1993, p. 26). The sunrise model was implemented “to help nurses visualize components of the theory influencing human care” (Reynolds, 1993, p.
26). It also provides the nurse with “culturally congruent nursing care to persons of diverse cultures” (Reynolds, 1993, p. 26, cited in Leininger 1988a). Leininger uses ethno nursing research “to discover ways to obtain accurate credible, confirmable, and meaningful data which reflects mainly the informant’s cultural life ways and insights about health and well-being” (Leininger 2009). It is important for the nurse to understand the client’s health beliefs related to disease or illness. This will help the nurse develop appropriate questions for the client during the assessment. In order to implement the sunrise model in practice, it is crucial to interact with the client with an open mind and learn about their lifestyles and culture from them. Leininger does not view environment “as central” (Reynolds, 1993, p. 17). Instead she prefers to use the term “environmental context” (Reynolds, 1993, p. 17). Leininger believes that the phrase environmental context incorporates a more holistic view of the environment for the client. Environmental context involves not only the current environment but also “the totality of human existence in different kinds of sociocultural and psychophysical environments” (Reynolds, 1993, p. 17). Understanding the client’s environment will help the nurse better approach the client’s
needs. Leininger’s cultural care diversity and universality theory takes into consideration a client’s cultural health and well-being beliefs. It is imperative that when working with the client the nurse recognizes what the client’s view of health is. For example, if an individual in an indigenous African tribe believes that bathing often offends his/her God, it is important for the nurse to recognize and take this into consideration to support his or her bathing techniques even if western cultures view it differently. In conclusion, Leininger’s cultural care diversity and universality theory incorporates all of the four common nursing elements. She believes environment to be more of a concept of holism and not central to the nursing theory. I feel that she incorporates the other elements completely enough so that the concerns of the environment fall into place if the theory is followed thoroughly. She also believes that health and well-being is individualized and important for the nurse to recognize. Leininger discusses combining two different styles of caring, generic and professional. Both need to be combined in order for her sunrise model to be effective. She developed ethno nursing to collect data that is credible and meaningful to the informant’s culture and life ways. I feel this theory is important to nursing because we all come from different back grounds and with different health beliefs that require personalized care techniques in order to heal or to continue our health and well being. I agree that it is important to take into consideration the client’s cultural beliefs in order to provide the best nursing care I can.