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Cultural awareness reflection essay
The importance of managing diversity
Cultural Awareness: Assumptions, Judgments, and Biases
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Nursing role and response to diversity Everyone agrees that nurses need to diversify themselves as individuals. This can be done through assimilating one’s own cultural understanding and knowledge into nursing care and be aware of the other individual’s culture. First, nurses need to identify what their cultural beliefs are. “Becoming aware of one’s own cultural heritage” (Blais & Hayes, 2016, p. 403). After nurses accomplish the first step, next is to identify and aknowledge patients’ culture. “Becoming aware of the client’s culture as described by the client” (Blais & Hayes, 2016, p. 403). The nurse can accomplish this step by allowing patients to share their beliefs, traditions, whishes, and values while they are in the hospital settings. …show more content…
All nurses seek to promote diversity within our society and work environment. There are different ways to promote diversity. By speaking against discrimination and racism, diversity is promoted on an individual basis. Nurses can use confrontation while dealing with individuals who are discriminating against gender, religion, sexual orientation, race, and origin for a safe and equal practice care. Nurses can also encourage diversity by gaining knowledge on how their own culture differ from other cultures. It is Ok to be proud of your own culture and beliefs as long as you understand and respect other individuals’ values and behaviors. This helps create a more diverse and culturally competent world. Employers can promote diversity through various training programs and educational sessions regarding diversity and cultural acceptance. Supervisors can encourage reporting any discriminatory behavior or closed groups that may have formed. This will allow a more respectful, comfortable, and culturally competent work …show more content…
This helps the nurse develop a culturally effective treatment plan. Patients have the rights to practice their cultural beliefs and values and the nurse should respect the patient’s wishes in order to achieve culturally competent care. This cultural assessment will help the nurses learn the patient’s understanding and interpretation of the illness and how close the client is to his/her native culture. The nurse can include the family as well when appropriate during his/her cultural assessment because family can provide various valuable information. Finally, all the gathered data should be respected and incorporated into the patient’s care and teaching plan to achieve
These differences in origin accounts for diversity in socio-cultural backgrounds and nurses must develop the knowledge and the skills to engage patients from different cultures and to understand the beliefs and the values of those cultures (Jarvis, 2012). If healthcare professionals focus only on a narrowly defined biomedical approach to the treatment of disease, they will often misunderstand their patients, miss valuable diagnostic cues, and experience higher rates of patient noncompliance with therapies. Thus, it is important for a nurse to know what sociocultural background a patient is coming from in order to deliver safe an effective
McClimens, A., Brewster, J., & Lewis, R. (2014). Recognising and respecting patients ' cultural diversity. Nursing Standard (2014+), 28(28), 45.
So, organizations need to educate all nurses of all levels about all forms of discriminatory behaviours occurred in workplaces (Hagey et. al). Moreover, nursing leaders can urge the organizations to develop anti-discrimination policies and support IENs, who face workplace racial discrimination, to report and seek legal justice (CNFU, 2007). It helps enhance patient safety, quality care and also increases inter-professional collaboration. Nursing leaders should take step to ensure that IENs are treated equitably in all health care setting (Franklin et al….). Further, they can promote positive organizational culture to IENs by ensuring equitable treatment in the workplace. Encouraging cultural sharing during formal meetings as well as informal gatherings helps IENs explore Canadian culture also the role of leader in organizational level. Finally, nursing leaders have to sit to talk with the employers to provide sufficient opportunities and resources to help flourish their professional skills then only quality care and patient safety can be
Integrating the framework will enable nurses to become culturally competent health care providers. First and foremost, the framework permit patients’ the opportunity to express their concerns and perception of their problem (Campinha-Bacote, 2011). Additionally, it focuses on incorporating the patients beliefs, values, and needs into the plan of care. The framework further give nurses an opportunity to better understand and evaluate their patients’ concerns. Campinha-Bacote (2011) reported that continuous encounters with culturally diverse backgrounds will lead nurses to validate, refine, or modify what they know of existing values, beliefs, and practices of a cultural group. This in turn, will develop into cultural desire, cultural awareness, and cultural knowledge. With the end result, being cultural
Providing culturally competent care is a vital responsibility of a nurse’s role in healthcare. “Culturally competent care means conveying acceptance of the patient’s health beliefs while sharing information, encouraging self-efficiency, and strengthening the patients coping resources” (Giddens, 2013). Competence is achieved through and ongoing process of understanding another culture and learning to accept and respect the differences.
As nurses entering the medical field understanding the culture of our patients is crucial to proper care. Each culture has their own set of beliefs and values that are shared among groups of people which influences personality, language, lifestyles, house hold, level modesty, social standings, foods, health treatment and identity. Culture affects how people view health and illness; dictating when, where and what type of medical treatment they will receive and who will be their care provider.
A cultural assessment interview is very important when taking care of patients or their families who may be from a different culture than the nurse’s. In order to be able to better take care of a patient, we first need to know their own interpretation of disease and illness within their cultural context, values, and beliefs. Since I am Indian and my culture is a mix of the Indian cultural beliefs and my religion Islam, I was looking forward to this interview so that I am able to learn more about different cultures using my assessment.
Transcultural nursing requires us to care for our patients by providing culturally sensitive care to a broad spectrum of patients. The purpose of this post is to describe cultural baggage, ethnocentrism, cultural imposition, prejudice, discrimination, and cultural congruence. I will also give an example of each term to help you understand the terminology related to nursing care. I will define cultural self-assessment and explain why it is valuable for nurses to understand what their own self-assessment means. Finally, I will describe the five steps to delivering culturally congruent nursing care and how I have applied these concepts to my nursing practice.
The term culture is defined as “the thoughts, communications, actions, customs, beliefs, values, and institutions of racial, ethnic, religious, or social groups” (Potter & Perry, 2013). With the increase of culturally diverse populations in the United States, it is important for nurses to practice cultural competence. Cultural competence is the ability to acquire specific behaviors, skills, attitudes, and policies in a system that permits “effective work in a cross-cultural setting” (OMH, 2013). Being culturally competent is essential because nurses who acknowledges and respects a patient’s health beliefs and practices are more likely to have positive health outcomes (OMH, 2012). Every culture has certain views and attitudes concerning health. The Jewish (also referred to as Jews), in particular, have intriguing health practices and beliefs that health care providers need to be aware of.
According to Andrews and Boyle (2016), having a diverse workforce provides a greater satisfaction among employees, which will result in higher retention of employees as well. By hiring a diverse culture within an organization this increases a workplaces economy and becomes a culturally competent organization. Otherwise, a high turnover can be very costly to an organization and the functionality can decrease. Many organizations have developed policies to help recruit and retain people from different backgrounds. When employees feel that they are valued because of their diversity, the employees will feel protected from discrimination, feel that there is room for advancement within the company, and increase employment retention (Kaplan, Wiley, & Maertz, 2011). With the increase of minorities across the nation, having diversity in nurses and healthcare workers to accommodate this diversity also improves the quality of care to the patients while also increasing their health outcomes and satisfaction (Ayoola, 2013). We have learned in the previous weeks that being able to communicate with our patient’s and understanding their culture can positively increase the outcome of the health. Having a diverse staff will also help establish trust and make them feel at ease. However, there can be barriers to having a diverse culture in the
for nurses to be aware of the diverse needs of many differing cultures. Learning and
As a nurse strive to provide culturally sensitive care, they must recognize how their client's and their perceptions are similiar as well as different. Nurse enhance their ability to provide client-centered care by reflecting on how their beliefs and values impact the nurse-patient relationship. To provide appropriate patient care, the nurse must understand her/his culture and that of the nurse profession. Cultural biases can be particularly difficult to identify when the nurse and client are of a similar cultural backgroup. When we recognize and know a culture, we will know what is right for our patient, and thus may impose our own values on the client by assuming our values are their values. Recognizing differences a present an opportunity not only to know the other, but also to help gain a greater sense of self. In this paper, I will explain more about diversity and cultural competence in case study.
Researching and developing awareness of different cultures beliefs, values, and practice can help aid with providing cultural competent care. As a healthcare professional, this is an essential competent for caring for patient of different ethnicity group. “Organizations and individuals who understand their clients’ cultural values, beliefs, and practices are in a better position to be co-participants with their clients in providing culturally acceptable care” (Purnell & Paulanka, 2008, p. 2). During the beginning of this course, I had taken a cultural competency quiz regarding my responses to the patient cultural values and belief practices. I will later discuss how my results from the cultural competency quiz changed
Cultural competence can be defined as using the ability of one’s awareness, attitude, knowledge and skill to effectively interact with a patient’s many cultural differences. Madeline Leininger, a pioneer on transcultural nursing describes it this way; “a formal area of study and practice focused on comparative human-care differences and similarities of the beliefs, values and patterned lifeways of cultures to provide culturally congruent, meaningful, and beneficial health care to people” (Barker, 2009, p. 498). The importance of cultural diversity in healthcare allows for the delivery of appropriate cultural autonomy. Showing respect for others will lead to trust between nurse and patient which in turn improves healing and health.
Characteristics can be as diverse as ethnic background, language spoken, gender status, physical appearance, race, and religion to name a few. Migration from various countries is creating a diverse population with different cultures and languages within the United States. Due to these cultural differences and lack of knowledge, disparities are increasing. Studies have shown that both language barriers and lack of cultural customs can hinder the services provided to the patient by the healthcare worker (Renzaho, Romios, Crock, & Sonderlund, 2013). This study provided a positive outcome when communication and cultural mutual understanding took place and patients had a more positive health outcome. It is very important that nurses are diversified in various cultures in order to better care for our patients. According to Mareno and Hart (2014), cultural competency has become one of the core values being taught in nursing programs. Their study showed that the perceived level of cultural awareness and skills among the nurses provided was low. Awareness and knowledge levels increased with higher education. It was highly recommended that self-awareness exercises be incorporated into the nursing course and continued to be addressed during the remaining curriculum until