Promoting Holistic Care by Advancing Cultural Competence of Nursing Students in Mainland China

Abstract

China is a multicultural society made up of 56 ethnic groups. In addition to the complex cultural healthcare beliefs and traditions, China’s 1.38 billion people live under diverse social and economic conditions. Providing holistic care in such a multifaceted context is challenging for nurses and nursing educators. If nursing students are to provide holistic patient care, then nurse educators must design courses and pedagogic strategies that enhance student capacity to assess and address unique needs including biological, psychological, social, and spiritual problems and concerns. In particular, beginning with spiritual dimension of health is promising because spiritual beliefs are interwoven within the cultural fabric of Chinese people. However, Chinese people do not readily share private thoughts and feelings, and thus even introducing the topic of the provision of spiritual care as part of nursing curricula is challenging. In this article we share the educational content and pedagogical approach that was implemented in an undergraduate multicultural nursing care course that was designed to overcome these challenges. The cultural competency model developed by Camphina-Bacote (Journal of Transcultural Nursing 13:181–184, 2002) was instrumental in structuring learning around spirituality as part of cultural competency training.