Cultural Diversities of Health and Nursing Care

Abstract

In the future, as nurses work with people from many different cultures, our efforts must go beyond the interest of caring only for the four Federally defined minority cultures (Chicanos, Afro-Americans, North American Indians, and Asian-Americans) to many cultural and subcultural groups in the world. In addition, we will be dealing with acculturation processes, sudden cultural contacts, and all kinds of cultural identity concerns related to rapid transportation, communication, and new technologies. How can the nurse of today become a sensitive and knowledgeable transcultural nurse to function in tomorrow’s world? What steps need to be initiated immediately to learn about transcultural nursing and health care? How do we prepare nursing faculty and nursing service directors to meet this inevitable huge challenge and responsibility to meet the needs of many diverse cultural groups? How can we guide nurses to deal effectively with cultural conflicts, gaps, and stresses in providing care? These questions and many others are extremely important ones to study and resolve. Presently, there are great voids in the nurse’s knowledge and awareness of working with people of diverse cultural and minority groups as well as dealing with the range of variations among cultures. Hence steps must be taken soon to remedy the situation for the immediate future. Presently, I find that a number of nurses are actively seeking ways to increase their knowledge and skills in order to work with many people of different cultural and subcultural value orientations. Their interest and response to caring for minority and majority cultural groups has been highly encouraging. Indeed, some Anglo-American nurses and others have performed with a marked sensitivity and open learning attitude in working with minority groups. All has not been unfavorable in our nursing efforts. Nonetheless, nurses must move to consider ways to provide more formal and informal transcultural nursing education, experiences, and guidance to work effectively in our multicultural society and in other parts of the world. I believe we can meet this tremendously stimulating challenge if our thoughts are focused upon this big goal to be achieved in transcultural nursing.