A Guide To Culturally Competent Nursing Care

Post by admin | November 14, 2018

Culturally competent nursing care is what every good nurse strives for. It is about respecting and understanding patients who may come from different cultures and ethnicities. As patients are becoming more and more diverse, those delivering nursing care Los Angeles will need to become more and more culturally competent and understanding. Many nurses don’t know where to start in their journey towards delivering more culturally competent care to their patients. To help with this, we have put together a list of some tips to help you strive towards culturally competent nursing care. Hopefully this will help you deliver more culturally competent nursing care to your patients.

Being Culturally Aware To be culturally aware, one much examine what cultures one is already a part of. Being aware of one’s own culture is a big first step in adequately providing culturally competent nursing care to patients.

Understanding Other Cultures Learning more information about other cultures and ethnicities, especially ones that you regularly treat is a great way to deliver a more culturally competent treatment to a patient. Oftentimes learning about a patient’s culture and ethnicity can go a long way in helping the patient feel comfortable in your care. Sometimes it may be a good idea to try and learn a new language especially if you find yourself treating a lot of patients whose native language isn’t English.

Explain Jargon Nurses know that healthcare is littered with hard to understand medical jargon. It’s often the type of things that can make a big difference in a patient’s life and treatment. Taking the extra time to really explain medical jargon to patients whose native language is not English can go a long way.

Respect At the core of providing culturally competent nursing care is respect for different cultures and ethnicities along with respect for those that come from different cultures and ethnicities. Exercising sensitivity and understand is a very important part to culturally competent nursing care.

What To Avoid There are many pitfalls in culturally competent nursing care. Here we will go into a few to avoid. As a nurse, you should not jump to conclusions or make any snap judgements about someone’s beliefs, race or religion. It’s important to ask questions about a person’s culture or ethnicity in a kind and professional way. As a nurse, you shouldn’t stereotype or assume certain things about a patient just because of their appearance, race, religion or country of origin.

Nursing Culture

As a whole you should not only be aware of yourself and your patient’s culture but creating one as a nurse that is inviting, inclusive, and respectful. When caring for the patient, it is important to be culturally sensitive towards their beliefs, opinions, language, and other aspects that make them who they are.

Educate Yourself

It is important that even when you disagree, you try to learn about their culture and the reasons they feel and act as they do. Gaining a better understanding may broaden your horizons and provide you with insight that can help you better treatment and care for the patient. Take the time to take an interest in who they are. If they speak another language, orient yourself with common phrases so that you limit the language barrier between the two of you. Research ways to communicate with those who do not speak English natively in a respectful and effective way.

Separate Yourself

The best way to not overstep the patient’s beliefs and cultural background is by checking your own preferences at the door. You are there to provide the best care that you can and that will be easier if you ensure that your own personal feelings do not get in the way of that. Remain compassionate and understanding without getting your cultural views mixed up with theirs.

Broaden your network

To ensure that you are providing culturally competent nursing care, talking to others can enlighten you to other cultures and areas in which you are strong or weak which will improve your cultural competency.

Social Media

Social media is a great way to see the lives of other people who may be a part of a different culture than yours. It will also help keep you up to date in terms of current cultural competency issues, making sure that you are aware and sensitive to what is going on in the world around you.

Online Chats

Be a part of the conversation. Sometimes, talking about it can improve it. This means that either talking with other nurses about cultural competency and cultural competency issues may improve your ability to be culturally competent. Also, it will open up an important discussion that can teach you more about certain cultures and the unique challenges they face.

Cultural Competence Begins with the Healthcare Provider

Although some of the work is up to the nurse, cultural competence stems from the hospice care and other health care providers.

Employ Diversity

To be culturally competent, you need to be culturally aware and acknowledge that a variety of different people are in the country who have various cultural backgrounds. Employing a variety of people will encourage your employees to learn about each other and participate in a provider that promotes cultural competency.

Offer Learning Opportunities

Training the employees you have on how to be culturally sensitive can improve how well they engage with other cultures. Also, it will make the agency more well rounded and better equipped to care for a wide array of patients. This can take on the form of language workshops, diversity discussions, and tools that can help nurses when working with patients different than them.