Nursing practice can be said to be a call to protect, promote, and optimize health and abilities. It also incorporates prevention of sickness and injury, facilitation of healing, alleviation of suffering via the diagnosis, and advocacy in the care of persons, families, and the communities at large. The fulfillment of this call requires effective communication to develop an understanding of several nursing responsibilities to patients, such as patient evaluation, counseling, and education. However, there is an increase in cultural mixtures among patients and nurses in the present world. This is due to the coexistence of diverse cultural groups in a similar region, the escalation of migration flows, differences in religion, language, social class, age, gender, education, and family structures. Therefore there is a rising concern connecting to a possible miscommunication that can create a misunderstanding in the scope of cultural diversity. This can produce dangerous impacts on patient safety and health outcomes. As a result, there is a need for nurses and stakeholders in health to understand the different effects of cultural issues on nursing practice to look for ways to deter the impacts.
History and Statistics of the Impacts of Cultural Issues
A review by Crawford, Candlin & Roger (2017) reveals that there is still a lot to be done regarding the approach that health experts working with cultural dissimilarity can use or how the issues affect day-to-day nursing practice. Furthermore, from a linguistic perspective, there is little assessment of intercultural nurse-patient communication. This means that more application of linguistic structures to nursing activities are likely to aid nurses in understanding occurring events during their interaction with patients, predominantly when it involves people from diverse cultures. Findings from meta-synthesis study done by Crawford et al. (2017) on the experiences of nurses during the deliverance of care to patients from different ethnic groups disclose the nurses' worry with access opportunities, communication obstacles, and care quality. It also shows a deviation in the number of nurse participants regarding gender, age, and education level. For instance, only about 41% of women and 13% of men nurses participated in the survey. The findings also showed that about 52% of nurse participants were professionals. Besides, according to Marion et al., (2016), the American Nurses Association (ANA) plays a vital role in establishing a proper contract that governs rapport between the nursing profession and the society, including the standards of practice and nursing scope.
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Significance to Health Issues
The health issues due to culture display a disequilibrium that requires the attention of nurses. It makes nurses to start considering new approaches to assist them in gaining expertise that will make them proceed and conquer cultural unsteadiness. In respect to their roles, nurses are compelled to become understanding, flexible, and recursive. The understanding evolves when the nurses begin to incorporate themselves in the cultures of the patients that they are attending (Murcia & Lopez, 2016). Through the virtue of understanding, nurses begin to realize the characters and wants of particular patients. Flexibility requires nurses to have an open mind to their patients regardless of their cultural differences. This means being open without judging patients' behaviors and attitudes. This aids in understanding cultural differences. Through understanding and flexibility, nurses initiate a plan and execute other interventions that are created via recursiveness (Marion et al., 2016). These are regarded as novel forms of implementing and resolving the difficulty in interacting with people with cultural diversity.
The Role of nurses
In consideration of the contract that nurses sign under ANA, the nurses have accountability and ethical obligation to patient care. This makes them to take the initial step in encountering patients from different ethical backgrounds. They have a responsibility to work under the hard internal and external factors that surround the care environment, called barriers. The exterior obstacles incorporate all difficulties for care delivery to the patients caused by factors beyond nurses' control. They include communication difficulties due to language differences and lack of privacy. These barriers make the informing responsibility of nurses demanding. Moreover, the existence of these barriers promotes the development of internal obstacles in nurses. This due to the cultural shock nurses experience in comparison to their cultural values and ethics, confronted with the cultural values and ethics of patients.
Relevancy to nursing practice
In consideration of the findings of Murcia & Lopez (2016), The study on the impacts of cultural issues in nursing forms a basis through which health organizations build their intervention efforts on external barriers such as culture. The study helps health organizations responsible for nursing practice to establish appropriate and competent linguistic services and evaluate time allocation required for the effective recital of professional nursing activities. The impacts as well reveal the need for the nursing professionals to spotlight on the internal obstacles. This includes acknowledgment, respect, and understanding of the cultural particulars. It distinguishes the patients they look after (Crawford et al., 2017). The topic is also relevant to nursing practice since it depicts the need for nursing professionals to be trained with ethical competences at the various recognized education centers. This will help in stimulating skills and knowledge in care delivery to culturally different populations.
Conclusion
Generally, a study on the impacts of cultural issues in nursing reveals that care delivery to culturally dissimilar people can be rewarding and admirable, but as well as challenging and demanding. There is a unique understanding showing that nurses experience permanent lessons during the delivery of care to people from dissimilar cultures. The impacts of cultural issues open new adventures in the knowledge of cross-cultural nursing. They are also the basis through which the need for nurses that is ready to respond to the multicultural world demands is revalidated. This is not only as a result of the effect of delivering ethnically modified care but also as a result of nurse fulfillment and affirmative discernment in the care experience.
References
Crawford, T., Candlin, S., & Roger, P. (2017). New perspectives on understanding cultural diversity in nurse–patient communication. Collegian, 24(1), 63-69.
Marion, L., Douglas, M., Lavin, M. A., Barr, N., Gazaway, S., Thomas, E., & Bickford, C. (2016). Implementing the new ANA standard 8: Culturally congruent practice. Online journal of issues in nursing, 22(1).
Murcia, S. E. A., & Lopez, L. (2016). The experience of nurses in care for culturally diverse families: A qualitative meta-synthesis. Revista latino-americana de enfermagem, 24.
