Cultural Care Universality and Diversity

Culture Care Universality

• Culture care universality refers to the common, similar, or dominant uniform care meanings, patterns, values, lifeways, or symbols among many cultures that reflect assistive, supportive, facilitative, or enabling ways to help people.

Culture Care Diversity

• Culture care diversity indicates the variabilities and/or differences in meanings, patterns, values, lifeways, or symbols of care within or between collectives related to assistive, supportive, or enabling human care expressions.
• Six cultural phenomena that vary with application and use yet are evident in all cultural groups:
  • Communication
  • Space
  • Social organization
  • Time
  • Environmental control
  • Biological variations

Culturally Competent Care

• Culturally competent care refers to the ability to bridge cultural gaps in caring, as well as working with cultural differences to enable clients and families to bring about meaningful care.

Culturally Unique Individuals

• Everyone is culturally unique and is a product of experiences, cultural beliefs, and cultural norms.

Transcultural Nurse

• A transcultural nurse helps patients by providing culturally sensitive care to patients from diverse cultural backgrounds.
• Characteristics of a transcultural nurse:
  • Ability to recognize and appreciate cultural differences in healthcare values, beliefs, and customs.
  • Ability to appreciate how someone's way of life, their modes of thought, and their unique customs can immensely affect the way they deal with illness, healing, disease, and death.

Roles and Responsibilities of Transcultural Nurse

• Communicate with foreign patients and their loved ones.
• Educate families on patients' medical status.
• Act as a bridge between a particular patient's culture and healthcare practice.
• Determine the patient's cultural heritage and language skills.
• Determine if any of the patient's health beliefs relate to the cause of their illness or problem.
• Collect information on any home remedies the person is taking to treat their symptoms.
• Understand the influence of culture, race, and ethnicity on the development of social and emotional relationships, child rearing practices, and attitude toward health.
• Collect information about the socioeconomic status of the family and its influence on their health promotion and wellness.

Sunrise Model of Madeleine Leininger's Theory

• The model is based on the concept of culture care and shows three major nursing modalities that guide nursing judgments and activities to provide 'Culturally Congruent Care':
  • Cultural care preservation or Maintenance
  • Cultural care accommodation or Negotiation
  • Cultural care repatterning or Restructuring

Test your understanding of cultural care universality, which refers to the common care patterns and values among many cultures, and cultural care diversity, which involves variability in nursing approaches to provide culturally competent care. This quiz covers the concepts of assistive, supportive, and facilitative care, and how they relate to culturally diverse patient populations.