Culturally Competent Nursing

Culturally Competent Nursing Care: Criticism of a Paper

Background

In the United States, nurses are caring for an increasingly diverse population. Minority groups, namely Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, constitute one third of the patients seeking cares in the United States. Therefore, it is necessary to diversify the nursing workforce to reflect this underserved population in order to deliver effective quality care and improve satisfaction and health outcomes. So called, the ability to provide culturally competent care is especially important in critical care setting. Nurses must develop cultural competency to effectively and accurately assess, develop, and implement nursing interventions designed

It requires an understanding of the care seeker 's culture and acknowledging what matters to them while caring them in the same as other individuals.

Article: Culturally Competent Care: Are we There Yet? The paper is written by Gloria Kersey-Matusiak, PhD, RD and focuses on culturally competent care among nurses. The paper tries to define the competent nursing care, explains it significance in our health care community, introduce a cultural assessment tool, and discusses how the knowledge of culturally competent care can be used in the practice.

Introduction to the Culturally Competent Care Firstly, the paper introduces a series of important questions a nurse should ask him/her about the importance of cultural competence in patient 's care, the assessment tool which is more feasible to use according to each specific population, and how that knowledge would help to improve patient 's care and reduce healthcare disparities especially for minorities.

Importance of the Culturally Competent

Limitations of the paper Although the paper gives a brief view over the concept of Culturally Competent Nursing Care by defining the term of "Cultural Competence", highlighting its importance in nursing care, and introducing a few number of assessment models to assure the highest population-specific care, it avoids to bring into attention a simplified step-by-step approach for nurses on how to learn the necessary skills of cultural competent care, how to incorporate it into their daily practice, and how to evaluate their current skills for the weak areas necessitating modification. It seems the main purpose of the criticized paper was to emphasize the importance of the nursing care to underrepresented minorities in the US health care system. This was achieved by introduction of a series of assessment tool and their utility in different cultural settings. However, it could be rationalized that the reason for shallow review of different models is the incorrectly perception of race and ethnicity as the main features of cultural variety. Nevertheless, we should note that despite the fact that race and ethnicity are the two most obvious features of cultural variation, other factors such as religion, education, profession, and sexuality might bear inevitable