Sensitive Nursing Care: A Concept Analysis

Transcultural nursing concepts were developed in the mid- 1950s by Madeleine Leininger. Essentially, the term "transcultural nursing" has penetrated the nursing field across cultural diversities and there are enormous implications of the definition of these concepts. Moreover, the increment of migration trend of people in different countries has caused the complexity in cultural issues. In fact, number of authors identified transcultural nursing as the combination of both the nursing theory and practice and anthropology where different nursing principles are used as a ground to study the various aspects of the delivery of care and the human behavior, origins, customs, development and social relationships are studied respectively.

On the other hand, one of the areas that is of importance to any nursing field including APN is the provision of a culture- sensitive nursing care thus, Transcultural nursing concentrates on the differences and similarities across cultures including respect to human care, health, and illnesses based upon the people's cultural values, beliefs, and practices, and to use this knowledge to provide cultural specific or culturally congruent nursing care to people. According to Leinenger (1991) that, "The main goal of transcultural nursing is to provide culturally specific care. But before transcultural nursing can be adequately understood, there must be a basic knowledge of key terminology such as culture, cultural values, culturally diverse nursing care, ethnocentrism, race, and ethnography."

Culture and Nursing Practice

From a multicultural perspective, nursing practice should employ specific knowledge regarding the specific needs, characteristics and differences in ideas, values, customs, and experiences of people from different racial and ethnic groups (White, 2003). Further, one notion is that nurses provide services quite differently and somewhat independently of the mainstream of nursing practice (Donnelly, 2006) however, advanced practice nursing has a deep understanding of their role as catalysts of change thus every individual with different cultural background deserves a quality nursing care.

Education and Research

According to Donnelly (2006), the provision of educational opportunities with a ground on nursing perspectives and methods to support evidence-based practice is one of the challenges facing the advanced practice nursing education programs so there should be resistance from nursing profession and health officials in the provision of education that which has the goal of adding only functions and tasks to the nursing role which will affect the sustainability and development of APN. It is important, therefore that there should be initiation as well as negotiation for APN to be efficient and effective and the basis would be the ability of the Advanced Practice Nurses to affect change in the context culture- sensitive quality nursing care. Moreover, their clinical expertise will serve as the foundation for their role.

Lastly, research serves as s a distinctive attribute of advanced practice nursing. Connelly (2006) notes that the representation of research and practice together is clear as appropriate research evidence will be helpful in dealing with specific patient problems including the different cultural issues; application of the evidence that will be manifested in the caring of patients with emphasis on culture sensitivity; and the evaluation of the outcome of the research grounded evidence. Further, implementation of studies using existing research for is also a research role used to improve nursing role.
References

Donnelly, Glenn (2006). The Essence of Advanced Nursing Practice. The Internet Journal of
Advanced Nursing Practice. Volume 8 Number 1.

Leininger, M. (1991). Transcultural nursing: the study and practice field. Imprint, 38(2), 55-66.

White, Hazel (2003). Implementing the Multicultural Education Perspective into the Nursing

Education Curriculum. Journal of Instructional Psychology. Volume: 30. Issue: 4.