Diversity In Nursing

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Nurses need to be skilled with the insight and knowledge to carry out culturally appropriate care. The application of cultural sensitivity starts with an awareness of one's own culture first and then they can look at the culture of other people. Nurses, based on their ability, should be self reflective about their own culture, open, honest and authentic in relating to culturally diverse individuals (Jeffreys, & Zoucha, 2017). Cultural diversity affects everyone. A person’s culture affects their perceptions of health, illness and death, beliefs about causes of disease, approaches to health promotion. Cultural diversity affects how a person experience and express their illness and pain, where they go for help and their treatment …show more content…

The increasing diversity of the nation brings opportunities and challenges for nurses, providers, health care delivery systems, and policy makers to create and deliver culturally competent services. The ethnocentric approaches used in the past to care for patients are ineffective in meeting health and nursing needs of diverse cultural groups of patients. Knowledge about cultures and its impact on interactions with health care is essential for nurses. Knowing a patient’s culture helps nurses to be aware of the person’s customs, beliefs, and faith. It helps nurses in understanding a patient’s experience with illness, suffering, and death. Knowing a patient’s culture helps strengthen a nurse's commitment to the nurse-patient relationship, focusing on the whole person rather than viewing the patient as pieces of symptoms or illnesses. It helps a nurse to be respectful, understanding, and open minded to non-traditional treatments, such as spiritually based therapies like meditation and Shamanism. Cultural diversity can strengthen, bring about positive outcomes and broaden the health care delivery systems (Green et al.,

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