Nursing Strategies

In the field of nursing, there is often a need for different strategies that are distinct from the norm. Community nurses should constantly be adapting to an ever-changing society while understanding the specific needs of the patients that they come across. One way this can be done is through the usage of cultural competence. 

Cultural competence is considered to be a lifetime educational process with regard to understanding the influence of culture on countless attitudes and values; the effect of language and communication styles among individuals and their communities, and the impact of health policies on many diverse ethnic groups. Professional nurses need to be able to ascertain specific knowledge and belief systems about health systems and the worldviews of these systems ("Standards of Practice for Culturally Competence Nursing Care," 2010). This understanding can be applied towards each of the four strategies: cultural preservation, cultural accommodation, cultural repatterning and cultural brokering in many distinct ways. 

One example of a nurse seeking to preserve a particular culture is by incorporating methodically sound practices such as acupuncture into the Western medical sphere. A nurse who uses cultural accommodation would use practices that have not been proved to be destructive to the patients such as the Mexican ritual of placing a metal object on the umbilicus of a newborn baby. Nurses who opt for cultural repatterning may work with a patient to help that patient alter the practices they are using that have been deemed detrimental. Cultural brokering is defined as a nurse acting as a delegate in a particular process to adopt a strategy (Huber, 2009). An example of this would be a nurse being a bridge between the doctor and the patient in solving the problems that diseases such as diabetes cause. 

Barriers to each of these will be on the nurse being able to help the patient understand the need for the changes to their cultural routines. In community health assessments, nurses have to have acquired the necessary skills to be able to help patients of all cultures understand the reasoning behind the need for the strategies of cultural competence.

References

Huber, L. M. (2009, May). Making community health care culturally correct. American Nurse Today, 4(5), Retrieved from http://amntstaging.augdev.com/Article.aspx?fid=5636&id=5654

Standards of Practice for Culturally Competent Nursing Care [PDF]. (2010, December 30). Retrieved from Expert Panel on Global Nursing & Health website: www.aannet.org/ep-global-nursing--health