Introduction
Nursing education and training institutions should ensure that future nurses are capable of delivering effective care depending on patients’ unique circumstances. Any care that is inconsistent with patients’ needs and circumstances may encompass an enormous risk that may hinder the achievement of positive health care outcomes. Patients in healthcare systems anticipate receiving high-quality health care (Arvind et al., 2013). Such care should be culturally competent.
Nursing education should initiate and maintain a spark where students can develop sufficient knowledge on diverse cultures, including how lack of such knowledge can influence their nursing practice. This goal can be achieved through the incorporation of Leininger Nursing Theory in nursing education (Betancourt & Daniel, 2015). Leininger suggested that people are living in multicultural societies, which underline the importance of culturally competent care. He claimed that such care provides room for patients to acquire first-class health care services (Betancourt & Daniel, 2015). Otherwise, patients become dissatisfied since their needs are unmet. Culturally incompetent care leads to undesirable health care outcomes (Giger, 2016). This situation gives rise to moral and ethical concerns on the necessity and purpose of the delivered care. This paper is organized in two main sections. Section one describes nurses’ education on cultural competency as an issue of concern in the application of Leininger Nursing Theory. The second section discusses the application Leininger Nursing Theory to nursing education.
Description of Issue or Concern
In a globalized world, the capacity to embrace and recognize cultural diversity is critical to today’s healthcare providers, including nurses. Nursing students pursue education that touches on the significance of recognizing coupled with developing an understanding of various cultural diversities. However, in practice, nurses unavoidably encounter patients and their families who come from diverse backgrounds. The issue or challenge in such situations involves how to identify and/or breach any cultural gap that may hinder successful diagnosis and adherence to the treatment process. How can nursing educators ensure that nurses become models of recognition based on their embracement of various cultural needs of the patients’ healthcare?
Nursing professionals should care about the issue of cultural diversity since it is central to the realization of health outcomes and in the delivery of high-quality care, especially while working in a multicultural context. In the delivery of quality care, nurses have the responsibility of ensuring the deployment of evidence-based nursing practices (Reneé, 2016) and technological interventions in the treatment process to reduce time required for diagnosis and healing. In fact, delivering the best care does not constitute the main challenge in the role of nurses in quality and risk management. The main challenge involves dealing with the modifiers of such a care. Cultural diversity constitutes one of the most important modifiers that need to be incorporated into nursing training and education.
People pursue careers in the nursing profession with the objective of participating in ensuring that patients recover from sickness to live healthy lives. This case underlines the significance of setting health goals together with patient and then seeking proactive strategies of realizing them. Culture is an important aspect that determines the nature and kind of health goals that a patient may be willing to undertake. Without considering the possible cultural barrier, some health goals, which may otherwise have been important in ensuring quick recovery, may be ignored or reluctantly implemented. Hence, cultural diversity is an issue of great importance in nursing professionals’ practice.
A large nursing scholarly work investigates the issue of cultural diversity, including how it influences the achievement of health care outcomes. Coined from the early work of Leininger, this body of literature is referred as transcultural nursing (Giger, 2016). Leininger Nursing Theory seeks to enhance patient care coupled with wellbeing by ensuring cultural competency in nursing. Although this mission may be accomplished through experience during practice, Betancourt and Daniel (2015) argue that health care organizations and patients are more likely to gain from culturally competent nursing care when cultural competence in nursing as developed by Leininger Nursing Theory forms part of nursing education. Administrators of health care anticipate that organizations in the system deliver patient-centered care in the most efficient way possible.
Nursing literature acknowledges the necessity of avoiding risks or hindrances to the delivery of patient-centered care. Such care leads to less bed days, lower number of recovery days, and few visits to healthcare delivery centers (Marcella, 2013). Hence, culturally competent care is necessary to help in improving health care outcomes. Cultural sensitivity is important in the development of patient-centered health goals. Nursing literature notes that in case of adequate and effective communication between health care givers and patients while working collaboratively towards achieving a common identified goal, the capacity to promote and protect life increases (Marcella, 2013).
Nursing literature describes how nurses, patients, and their relatives can enhance communication to guarantee the correct diagnosis. Through such communication, it also becomes possible to exchange cultural dimensions and worldviews (Betancourt & Daniel, 2015). This claim suggests that any nursing skills, including communication tactics, should be implemented in practice in a culturally sensitive manner. The concern or the issue of cultural diversity in nursing in the context of patient care occurs in every situation that involves patients from different cultural backgrounds. Since people today live in multicultural contexts (Giger, 2016), the issue is commonplace in all nursing practices.
In nursing, stakeholders refer to all people and entities that are affected by a decision, action, or way of doing things adopted by a nurse. In case of the issue of culturally sensitive care, key stakeholders include the nurses who deliver care services, the organization that the nurses work for, the patients, and their (patients) immediate family members. The patient is directly influenced by the nurses’ cultural sensitivity. He or she expects the nurse to deliver care that is consistent with his or her culture. When this mission is accomplished, the patients coupled their immediate family members are likely to increase their frequency of searching health care services and even trust the nurse in the development of care plans’ goals and objectives. The organization is interested in ensuring that care is delivered consistently with nursing ethical guidelines. It is also concerned with the capacity of the care delivered to enable it achieve better health outcomes for its patients and their immediate family members.
Application of the Selected Nursing Theory to the Issue or Concern
The work of Giger (2016) identifies transcultural nursing as an important paradigm that underscores the need for nurses to work and make decisions on patient care in a multicultural context. This concern relates to the contribution of Leininger Nursing Theory to the nursing practice. The theory is utilized in resolving the issue of cultural diversity in nursing practice by its integration into nursing education and training. Leininger’s himself stresses that transcultural nursing has its roots anchored on education focusing on cultural sensitivity. He advocates education that focuses on different cultures not only in undergraduate training, but also as an integral part of on-job-training for nursing professionals (McFarland, 2014). This plan encompasses one of the ways in which education can help in developing culturally sensitive nurses.
Leininger Nursing Theory can help to resolve the issue of the development of nursing, which is culturally sensitive in various ways. For example, enhancing cultural interactions during early years of nursing education can increase cultural diversity knowledge and competence, which can then be extended to patient-nurse interactions. Hence, education facilities for nursing should encourage and/or advocate the admission of culturally diverse student population. The objective here is to create cultural diversity awareness. Hence, during on-job training, practicing nurses are not caught in a shock, especially when they encounter situations that create cultural conflicts.
The above strategy can be implemented by ensuring that nursing training facilities not only include various courses on diverse cultures, but also guarantee regulated admissions that result in even-student population based on cultural backgrounds. This strategy can create a dissimilar nursing workforce just like the diverseness of the patients that nurses attend to in transcultural nursing settings. This situation has the effect of upholding cultural learning and assimilation. Evidence from National Council of State Board of Nursing (NCSBN) supports the necessity of implementing such a strategy based on Leininger Nursing Theory.
A 2013 survey conducted by NCSBN indicated that minority nursing workforce only represents 19% of the total registered nurses in the US (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2014). Taking into consideration the ethnic and/or racial characteristics of the workforce, the organization reported that the US nursing population consists of 83% Caucasian/White. African-Americans only accounted for 6%, the Asian race accounted for 6% while Hispanics accounted for 3%. Indian natives and Hawaii citizens only accounted for 1% each. All other races that formed part of the US cultural diverse citizenry only accounted for 1% (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2014). Therefore, it clear that transcultural nursing has to initiate from admission policies for nursing students.
The suggested solution should be subjected to research to determine how it may contribute to culturally sensitive patient-nurse interactions and subsequently the delivery of culturally sensitive care. Particular focus of such future research should be on the correlations between culturally diverse nursing workforce and the delivery of culturally sensitive patient care. It would also be interesting to know how such sensitivity would contribute to the attainment of quality care and exemplary health care outcomes.
Conclusion
Nursing education focuses on strategies for protecting, promoting, and optimizing health. Such education ensures that nursing professionals actively participate in the prevention of illness and injury. Nursing services are important in the alleviation of suffering through the diagnosis and treatment of people. Consistent with these objectives, nursing theory, which is critical in informing nursing education curriculum, identifies factors that may influence the capacity to promote, protect, and/or optimize health. Leininger Nursing Theory identifies cultural difference between a nurse or any medical practitioner and the patient as one of such factors.
Leininger Nursing Theory can play an important role in ensuring that nursing education prepares future nurses to work in multicultural contexts. In my opinion, having awareness of the contribution of such cultural difference to achieving the anticipated health outcomes will pave way for nurses to join practice with adequate cultural intelligence. This plan can help in eliminating all impediments to quality care and the attainment of better patient health outcomes, irrespective of their cultural diversities.
Reference List
American Association of Colleges of Nursing. (2014). Fact Sheet: Enhancing Diversity in the Nursing Workforce. New York, NY: AACN.
Arvind, R., Garima, S., Ramanjeet, K., Vidha, C., Leela, M., & Hem, C. (2013). Augmenting nursing care quality and implementing change management in India: an amalgamated approach. Journal of Nursing Management, 21(8), 1053-1060.
Betancourt, B., & Daniel, A. (2015). Madeleine Leininger and the Transcultural Theory of Nursing. The Downtown Review, 2(1), 1-7.
Giger, J. (2016).Transcultural nursing: Assessment and intervention. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier Health Sciences.
Marcella, H. (2013). Elevating Nursing Leadership at Bedside. NAINR, 13(3), 127-130.
McFarland, M. (2014). Madeline M. Leininger: Culture care theory of diversity and universality: Nursing theorists and their work. St. Louis, MO: Elsevier Health Sciences.
Reneé, R. (2016). Quality improvement and pain management: an evidence–based approach. Pediatric Nursing, 42(1), 39-49.