Nowadays, one may say that the element of care is an integral and evident part of nursing. However, not all previous healthcare professionals recognized that precise care is the key to patients’ healing, growth, hope, and well-being. What is more, it was challenging for nurses to understand that the care they provided to their clients had to correlate with patients’ specific cultural traits. In the 1990s, an American nursing professional and theorist Madeleine Leininger created an outstanding cultural care diversity theory, in which she highlighted the essence of these two elements.
It is hard to disagree that the primary role of health professionals is to help people and make sure that all their actions are as beneficial as possible. While there are basic and general treatment recommendations, nursing interventions are especially effective when their approach is designed specifically for a particular patient. Thus, according to Leininger, care should be provided through “cognitively based assistive, supportive, facilitative, or enabling acts or decisions that are mostly tailor-made to fit with individual, group’s, or institution’s cultural values, beliefs, and lifeways” (Nursing Theory, 2020, para. 2). In this way, nursing care becomes culturally congruent, and its efficiency increases significantly.
Consequently, nurses need to be aware of various cultural diversities and ensure that they can always apply this knowledge to a specific situation. Leininger’s theory states that healthcare professionals’ culturally-based decisions have to meaningfully fit patients’ different lifeways, values, and beliefs to foster their well-being and prevent illness (Nursing Theory, 2020). Finally, the concept of co-participation and cooperation of nurses and clients is also an integral component of the theory (Nursing Theory, 2020). They need to work together when creating and implementing their unique and culturally-based treatment plan, so if the aforementioned elements are considered, the outcomes are more likely to be positive.
Reference
Nursing Theory. (2020). Culture care theory. Web.