Registered Professional Nurse Responsibility Paper

Cultural Competence: Registered Professional Nurse Responsibility Paper
Name
Institution
Cultural Competence: Registered Professional Nurse Responsibility Paper
PART 1
Culturally Competent Care
Culturally competent care describes the ability of healthcare systems to offer health care to patients of different backgrounds with diverse beliefs, values, and principles. According to Dreachslin, Gilbert, & Malone (2013), this encompasses the ability of health care practitioners to tailor their service provision to meet the needs of their patients in terms of their social, cultural, and linguistic background. A healthcare institution that is culturally competence emphasizes on certain culture, behaviors, and attitude among its workforce that ensures the appreciation of other people from different cultural backgrounds. Culturally competence care provides the hallmark to increased access to quality healthcare for all people irrespective of their origin. It also provides healthcare facilities the chance to increase their market base as they can extend their services to many people from different backgrounds. In order to enhance culturally competent care, healthcare institutions should ensure they adopt a system that best considers the diverse needs of various populations (Dreachslin, Gilbert, & Malone, 2013). The institutions should embrace diversity in its own working environment by ensuring there is existence of diversity within the organization leadership and within the workforce. Health care providers should foster good communication with patients of different ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds.
Four Guidelines the Registered Professional Nurse May Use to Enhance Their Ability to Provide Culturally Competent Care
Nurses are encouraged to demonstrate their capacity and ability to serve individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds. As health care professionals, they need to constantly increase their knowledge and improve their skills to deal with patients from diverse populations (College of Nurses of Ontario, 2009). Prior to entering the professional line of duty, a nurse should anticipate the type of cultural communities she is likely to serve and then acquire the necessary information about the population to use in developing the right competence to serve the community appropriately.
In order to help in enhancing of the ability to provide culturally competent care, a registered professional nurse can use some guidelines to facilitate the process. The guidelines are primarily based on self-reflection, acquisition of cultural knowledge, facilitating client choice, and proper communication (College of Nurses of Ontario, 2009). Understanding one’s culture is an important element in nursing. Self-reflection helps professional nurses to understand their own culture and that of their nursing profession. Every person has his/her own particular values, beliefs and biases among others. These elements play an important role in influencing how a person views and responds to life and other people. By self-reflecting, a nurse is placed in a good position to identify the biases, principles, and values that underlines his/her approach and interventions, and how they impact on patients. A professional nurse should consider his/her reactions towards different situations and ascertain the reasons for responding in that particular way. A nurse should understand the nursing culture based on values such as truthfulness, caring, respecting client choices, promoting health, empathy that sets the threshold on how he/she should interact with patients.
Although it may be difficult for nurses to understand all the cultures of the populations within which they operate, it is important for them to have an extensive knowledge of how a culture can influence people’s beliefs and behaviours. In doing this, professional nurses should be able to recognize that different cultures may view certain responses and behaviours in different ways. In this regard, people’s beliefs and values may affect their perception of illness, health, and death, views of medical practitioners and hospitals, communication norms, and effectiveness of different medical procedures among others (College of Nurses of Ontario, 2009). Having some good knowledge on these issues would help a nurse understand his/her clients better and thus being in a position to provide culturally competent care.
Different patients have different needs when it comes to matter pertaining to their health care. A professional nurse’s role is to help a client meet the specific health goals she/he desires. In this regard, the nurse should try to investigate the patient’s views in order to understand the perception and intention behind the particular request and the client’s goals for treatment. Although there are some occasions when some clients do not know what they want in terms of their treatment, it is the obligation of the nurse to exploit the perspectives of the client in order to understand what the client really desires for his/her treatment. Despite the fact that a professional nurse is supposed to facilitate client’s choice, sometimes such choices, which are based on their cultural beliefs, may pose danger to the welfare of the patient. In such a case, the nurse should try explaining the risks associated with that particular choice and help the client understand the need to opt for an alternative that would impact the treatment process in a positive way.
A good nurse-client relationship is centered on meaningful communication between the two parties (Kersey-Matusiak, 2013). A professional nurse should develop an effective communication plan that would ensure the client is well informed about every step and procedure taken in the course of his/her treatment. Such a communication plan should be able to work against any possible communication barrier. The communication plan can embrace different approaches such as verbal and non-verbal communication. In situations where a nurse may find himself working with a client of different language, the problem of language barrier can be solved using an interpreter to help the two communicate with each other (College of Nurses of Ontario, 2009). A family member or any other person available within the organization can do such interpretation roles. However, it is always important that the nurse get the client’s consent before any interpreter is asked to do the job. This is necessary as the nurse has the duty to protect the privacy of the medical information of the client.
Incorporation of the Guidelines into the Provision of Culturally Competent Patient Centered Care in Different Care Settings
When providing culturally competent patient centered care in a hospital or community setting, a registered professional nurse should collaborate with his/her client to develop a comprehensive plan of care. Every client has a particular plan of care that is applicable to him/her. This is because an individual plan of care would include the influence of his/her culture, beliefs, and values. Before starting to work with a particular client, it is necessary that the nurse first assesses the client to draw relevant cultural information (College of Nurses of Ontario, 2009). To accomplish this, the nurse can ask the client open-ended questions to allow him/her explain on his/her perspectives. It is advisable that the nurse observes nonjudgmental attitude during the process and listen properly in order to discern what the client expects of him/her. This would allow the nurse to understand the cultural preferences of the client that can be used to establish mutual goals of the patients and the nurse that can be used to develop the health ...