Cultural Sensitvity in Nursing Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Cultural Sensitvity in Nursing - Assignment Example As a requirement, client centered care does place much emphasis on the nurses to put into consideration the cultural practices of their clients or patients and the culture of nursing and together find a way out on how these two separate cultures do affect the relationship between the patient and nurse or nurse-patient relationship. Various scholars have come up with good and comprehensively researched works on cultural sensitivity in nursing practices. We also have a guideline for this field dubbed the Professional Communication Cultural Sensitivity Guide which could help give necessary and useful information to a nursing professional. It is however important to note that even with all the proposed guidelines and key principles, there is no single acceptable way of dealing with all cultural diversities because of the unique aspects of individuals and cultures themselves. The only constant is that the needs of the client come first! Nurses should therefore work hard and smarter in pro viding a culturally sensitive care by recognizing how their perceptions with those of the client could be both similar and different. This paper thus seeks to highlight key points with short discussion based on an article presented by a scholar, Deborah Dysart-Gale PhD, RN dubbed â€Å"Cultural Sensitivity beyond Ethnicity: A Universal Precautions Model† on the same. Culturally Sensitive Health Care (Article Review) Research has dwelt on the healthcare related needs of certain chosen ethnic groups and linguistic minorities. This approach has been noted to present the practitioner with the risk of basing her or his work on essentialized and or stereotyped accounts of a given cultural group and in this regard end up overlooking the specific needs of special groups such as elderly, gay, and physically challenged, among others which are important groups in cross-cultural nursing practices. For this reason and others, there is still debate as to how a professional nurse should bes t learn and provide the culturally sensitive care (Dysart-Gale, 2006. An approach of providing education of healthcare and cultural practices that are commonly encountered in healthcare practice is proposed. However, the difficulty comes in choosing such a group to study when we have uncountable number of cultures that are both diverse and unique. This scholar argues against this kind of approach and instead supposes that these nursing practitioners could be made aware of the factors that do influence cultural behaviors from a universal point of view. In this regard, the author concurs with the universal precautions model used as a tool that promotes infection control. In this approach, all practitioners are advised to approach all their patients as if these patients were quite infectious for the blood borne diseases and this call upon them to act conscientiously so as to prevent any form of contamination. In practice, it has been prompted that all patients do need health teaching a s a way of imparting health literacy to them (Dysart-Gale, 2006. This model does give an opportunity to provide culturally appropriate care instead of the traditional practice of targeting specific characteristics of any one given culture. They thus do need to provide healthcare on the basis of an assumption of existence of cultural