Question

What are they Nursing responsibilities and effective communication strategies relating to interactions of the aging population of diverse culture and spiritual backgrounds.

Answer 1

Cultural respect is vital to reduce health disparities and improve access to high-quality healthcare that is responsive to patients’ needs. The trend of today’s healthcare leans toward being more inclusive of personal and cultural preferences. This demands a knowledgeable and open response from caregivers.

Framework for Delivering Culturally Competent Nursing Services:

As health professionals, it is important that nurses recognize and understand differences that can lead to poor patient-nurse interactions and to incorporate the needs and concerns that are specific to cultural heritage and historical encounters of medical systems.

1. Cultural awareness:

It involves self-examination of in-depth exploration of one’s cultural and professional background. This component begins with insight into one’s cultural healthcare beliefs and values.

2. Cultural knowledge:

This involves seeking and obtaining an information base on different cultural and ethnic groups.

3. Cultural skill:

It involves the nurse’s ability to collect relevant cultural data regarding the patient’s presenting problem and accurately perform a culturally specific assessment.

4. Cultural encounter :

This is the process that encourages nurses to directly engage in cross-cultural interactions with patients from culturally diverse backgrounds. Nurses increase cultural competence by directly interacting with patients from different cultural backgrounds. This is an ongoing process; developing cultural competence cannot be mastered.

5. Cultural desire :

It refers to the motivation to become culturally aware and to seek cultural encounters. This component involves the willingness to be open to others, to accept and respect cultural differences and to be willing to learn from others.

To work effectively with culturally diverse clients, you will need knowledge and skills.

You will need to:

• Be aware of your own cultural background/experiences, attitudes, values, and biases that might influence your ability to assist clients from diverse cultural populations. It is essential that you correct any prejudices and biases you may have regarding different cultural groups.
• Educate yourself wherever possible to enhance your understanding and to address the needs of culturally diverse clients. This may involve learning about cultural, social, psychological, political, economic, and historical material specific to the particular ethnic group being served.
• Recognise that ethnicity and culture may have an impact on a client’s behaviour.
• Assist clients to become aware of their own cultural values and norms, and facilitate discovery of ways clients can apply this awareness to their own lives and to society at large, as well as within the organisation.
• Respect the client’s religious and/or spiritual beliefs and values.
• Work to eliminate biases, prejudices, and discriminatory practices.
• Provide information in a language that the client can understand.
• Provide information in writing, along with oral explanations.

The following are some communication strategies we can use to help older people and their families :

• Listen to their concerns, regardless of how we perceive the situation.
• Acknowledge their emotion: “I can see you are very upset/angry”.
• Invite them to tell their story: “Can you tell me what’s bothering you?” and listen out for goals we may be able to address.
• Reframe emotions or situations from ‘negative or difficult’ to an opportunity or catalyst to further explore a situation.
• Align our body language with the intention to listen, nod, make eye contact, don’t cross our arms, etc.
• Avoid interruption
• Use skills such as empathy, reflection and validation to negotiate a realistic goal, sometimes it can be as simple as saying we will ask the doctor to give them a call.
• Empathy: “ It sounds like what you are going through is really upsetting and difficult”
• Reflection: “So I hear you saying you are very concerned that…?”
• Validation: “It’s understandable that you feel angry about …
• Negotiate: “It’s afterhours now, but what I can do is…?"