Madeleine Leininger Research Paper

What does it take to make a great impact in Nursing? How does a prodigious nurse bring about change? By caring, caring is the only way to optimize healing in a culturally diverse world. Nursing Theorist, Madeleine Leininger, was a living example of what it meant to care, she defined what it took to make an impact. The conception of “caring” was acquired early on in Leininger’s nursing career (Leininger, 1991). As it became, evidently, clear that care and its’ deliverance to an unknown knowledge based on culture, Leininger began to explore and identify nursing’s short comings of experience used in the aid of healing and wellness cross-culturally. “During the 1950’s, while working in a child guidance home, Leininger experienced what she describes as a cultural shock when she realized that recurrent behavioral patterns in children appeared to have a cultural basis. Leininger identified a lack of cultural and care knowledge as the missing link to nursing’s understanding of variations required in patient care to support compliance, healing and wellness” (George, 2002). “Caring became a focal point as a central

Growing up on a farm, she was inspired by an educated plethora of family members to include her sister who was teaching at age 17. She received her diploma in nursing from St. Anthony’s school of Nursing in Denver, Colorado in 1948, which solidified her registered nurse status. In 1950, she continued her education receiving a BS from St. Scholastica (Benedictine College) in Atchison, Kansas. Within 6 years of her bachelor’s degree, she would earn a M.S. in psychiatric and mental health nursing from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Her Ph.D. was acknowledged in Cultural and Social Anthropology from the University of Washington in 1965, she solidified her status as the first nurse in history to earn this prestige at a doctorate level (Tomey and Alligood,