Delivering culturally competent nursing care

Summary: While health care disparities among different racial and ethnic groups are the result of complex factors, building cultural competency skills among health care providers is one way to address these inequities. This text has been written to help nursing students and practitioners in applying cultural competency skills to various patient care situations. It offers a how-to approach to the development and application of these skills and provides numerous techniques for cultural self-assessment and cultural patient assessment. Its unique framework - considered to be a highly important facet of developing culturally competent nursing care - is based on the cultural competency staircase model, a self-assessment model that was developed by the author, who has over 30 years of clinical practice in culturally diverse settings. The text begins by defining cultural competency and describes how nurses can use the staircase model to determine their level of cultural competency. It focuses on critical self-reflection as the key to overcoming barriers to cross-cultural interaction and developing cross-cultural communication skills. The book provides effective strategies for the cultural assessment of patients and focuses on working with culturally diverse colleagues and patient populations. Using case vignettes, it presents problematic clinical scenarios related to cultural diversity and discusses how to resolve them. Each chapter opens with learning objectives and key terms, and ends with important points, NCLEX-type review questions, and a list of additional resources. Additionally, the AACN Cultural Competencies for Baccalaureate Graduates are addressed in each chapter. Key features: Provides multiple strategies to assist nurses in facilitating cultural competency; Introduces an easy-to-follow self-assessment model for nursing students and novice nurses, and integrates this model throughout; Covers working with culturally diverse colleagues and care of bariatric patients, new immigrants, patients with disabilities, patients with varied sexual orientations, and more; Includes challenging case scenarios drawn from real-life situations; Designed for use throughout the undergraduate curriculum.