Strategies That Promote Culturally Sensitive Health Care
The future of nursing science is expected to experience remarkable growth and influence topics that have possible cultural outcomes in health care. The year 2010 was monumental in nursing practice in that the Institute of Medicine published the Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health. The future of nursing is a vision that aims at how the roles of nurses and education should be transformed to serve the demand for healthcare developed by the health care reform to improve the health system of the country (Shaffer, 2019). The future of nursing extends the expectations of nursing to 2030. It offers direction that will help the nation reduce health disparities, develop a health culture, and improve the health of the American citizens. A topic such as transcultural nursing includes cultural implications of the future of nursing to the nursing field. With transcultural nursing, nurses can appreciate and recognize differences in customs, beliefs, and healthcare values of the patients. As a result, patients receive improved healthcare outcomes because the nurses consider the patients’ cultural backgrounds, understand potential barriers to care, and acknowledge about risk factors of different cultures.
Some of the recommendations for the future of nursing include prioritizing on diversifying the nursing workforce and promoting nurses’ pursuit of doctoral degrees. The future of nursing can emphasize the recruitment and retention of a culturally diverse nursing workforce in achieving health equity. Due to the changes in demographics accompanied by the current disparities in health care as well as health outcomes, there is a need to diversify the country’s nursing workforce to mirror the nation’s change in demographics. As per the 2014 U.S census Bureau,29% of employed registered nurses come from minority groups, and male nurses account for 10% of all working and registered nurses. Nurse leaders can achieve diversity by encouraging their employers to not only recruit and maintain minority nurses. The future of nursing can emphasize on the importance of promoting the pursuit of nurses for the doctor of philosophy degree and doctor of practice degree through the expansion of programs and incentives. This recommendation would help in ensuring that health care has an adequate supply of nurses for faculty and leadership positions as well as for clinical care research. For instance, DNP and Ph.D. can provide course work that enables nurses to work as faculty by equipping them with skills to teach in the healthcare system.
Cultural sensitivity, interprofessional collaboration, and cultural competency can be addressed in the changes through knowledge, communication, and interprofessional education. Cultural sensitivity is the awareness of cultural similarities and differences existing t between people. It can be addressed in the promotion of a diverse nurse workforce by focusing on knowledge. Training nurses on what cultural sensitivity is and why it is essential can help improve attitudes among the nurses and yield positive health outcomes. Cultural competence is about nurses’ actions in building understanding between patients by being respectful to the different cultural perspectives towards equality in healthcare. Nurses’ education can develop cultural competency skills such as assisting non-English speaking colleagues and patients with a translator for nurses working in diverse environments (Reed, 2017). The reason is that the values and beliefs of each cultural group are found in its language. Thus improving communication and language barriers improves cultural competency. Interprofessional collaboration can be enhanced through interprofessional education. This type of education is a collaborative approach that develops nursing students to become interprofessional team members. Training nurses using this model results in improved health care outcomes for the patients.
References
Reed, C. (2017). Cultural competence. AJN, American Journal of Nursing, 117(7), 13.
Shaffer, F. (2019). Past, present, and future: Nurses address the times of our lives. The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, 24(2).