Question

Please write a two page reflection using the following questions as a guide:

1. What is cultural competency?

2. Why is cultural competency important in the nurses’ workplace?

3. What recommendations do you have for individual nurses and nursing students to become more culturally aware?

4. Have you ever felt that you have been in one of these positions where you were the person who was different in the group? If you did, also include in your reflections: How did you feel?

5. Did someone help you to feel more comfortable and what did they do to assist you to feel more included?

6. Did this experience give you more insight into what you can do as a nurse to help your patient feel more comfortable in a foreign setting?

Answer 1

Answer: Cultural competency can be defined as the ability to understand and recognize the beliefs of the diverse cultural people. It is also a kind of consideration of respecting the beliefs, values of the other culture.

Cultural competency is important in the nursing profession as due to increased diversity in the population increases the demand of the nurses to take care of the patients who have different cultures. So, to provide quality of care to the patients, it is important to understand the cultural beliefs of the patients, language that the patient understands or speak etc. This will enable the nurses to communicate the patient and understand their needs. By providing cultural competence environment to the patients, the quality of care can be enhanced. So, cultural competency is important in nurses workplace.

Nurses and nursing students should indulge in various evidence based practice to provide better quality of care. Nurses should respect the decision, moral values of the patients. It is important to make patients understand the need of the treatment. By providing cultural competence environment, nurse can perform better healthcare assessment.

At present, every healthcare professionals should indulge themselves in better understanding of the cultural competence need. It makes patient to feel more comfortable which can improve the treatment process as patient can easily describes their need and problems.

Working in a diverse cultures becomes challenging sometimes because it is not certain that each culture can be understood. But this makes this more challenging and hence a translator or a mediator is required to convey the messages.