Patient Cultural Assessment

Instruction: Find a nursing or medical journal article that talks about a health or illness related cultural practice or belief related to your patient’s culture. Reflect on what you learned from the article, how it will impact or not impact your nursing practice, and how the information could be used to create culturally competent interventions for your patient. Your reflection needs to be more than just repeating what the article said, but focusing more on what you learned about it, and any reactions you have to the article.

This is an example

The article I read for this assignment is titled as “Nursing Responses to Transcultural Encounters: What Nurses Draw on When Faced with a Patient from Another Culture.” This article was a descriptive survey research conducted to explore the nurses encounter with patients from other than their own culture. This article discussed how nurses are interacting with other culture patients, what they depend on or what they draw on in encountering with diversified cultural patients, how to avoid bias and assumptions in delivering holistic and culturally competent care. The main finding of this research is that majority of the practicing nurses in healthcare are drawing on previous experience that they had with their family, friends, through education and training, and most also from travel, media and internet. It is suggested that to improve culturally competent care, nursing schools and institutions should offer more training and continuing education on culture, the availability of interpreters, exposing to diverse cultures. I also think it would be better if nursing programs included some course works to be done out in culturally diverse population than always in class and clinical. I think incentives for multilingual and multicultural nurse professionals and encouraging multicultural/lingual students into nursing programs by providing some spaces would be also a good tip. Generally, this article would help nursing students to be culturally sensitive, self-aware, and understand their implicit bias in delivering care. It helps improving the habit of learning from patient than previous experiences and assumptions, and thus reduces health disparities among patients coming from other cultures.

Reference:

Celeste Cang-Wong, RN, MS Candidate, Susan O Murphy, RN, DNS, and Toby Adelman, RN,

PhD (2009). Nursing Responses to Transcultural Encounters: What Nurses Draw on When Faced with a Patient from Another Culture.

Wallace, Meredith PhD, APRN; O’shea, Eileen DNP, RN “Perceptions of Spirituality and Spiritual Care Among Older Nursing Home Resident at the End of Life”