Transcultural Nursing

Transcultural nursing is a nursing speciality that concerns itself with how professional nursing interacts with the concept of culture. Based on anthropology and nursing, it is supported by nursing theory, research and practice. It is a specific cognitive speciality in nursing that focusses upon global cultures and comparative cultural caring, health and nursing phenomena. It is a body of knowledge that is dedicated at providing nursing care while bearing in mind the notion of being culturally appropriate with regards to the patient’s culture, belief and other personal sentiments with the objective to increase positive health outcomes within the patient’s recovery.

The discipline of transcultural nursing has existed as a formal area of enquiry and practice since 1955. Its founder, Madeleine Leininger, was the first professional nurse who finished a doctorate degree in anthropology. She began teaching the first course related to transcultural nursing at the University of Colorado in 1966. While authoring many a books pertaining to the elaboration on the notion of transcultural nursing, she was also the editor of the Journal of Transcultural Nursing. In 1998, she was honoured as being a Living Legend of the American Academy of Nursing for her pioneering contributions for developing a new area of study within the context of nursing.

Patients come from various kinds of cultural backgrounds and each culture has its own peculiarities which might not be immediately known to many people. For many, respecting one’s culture and cultural aspects is an important part of their own identity and it helps considerably when it comes to mitigating distress and despair. Regarding modern approaches to healthcare and nursing, there is a need to treat the patient as a legitimate human being and a huge aspect of that person’s humanity stems from the cultural background in which they are raised. It is also important and even interesting to study and understand how different cultures approach the question of nursing. Hence, these are the needs that the discipline of transcultural nursing strives to address by giving nursing students the various tools and specialized knowledge which are necessary to discharge their functions as a culturally conscious nurse who is able to cater to the particular cultural sensibilities of their patients while giving them the nursing care that is necessary for increasing positive health outcomes within the patient and thereby help them to recover as fast as possible, reducing emotional distress and making them optimistic about themselves.

The use of transcultural nursing is very evident when one sees the goals of transcultural nursing. The goals of transcultural nursing is to provide culturally congruent nursing care and give culture specific and universal care practices in order to ensure good health and well-being of people or to aid them in facing adverse human conditions, illness or death in a manner that is culturally significant and meaningful for the patient(s) in question. Thus, the objectives which transcultural nursing strives to achieve gives an excellent glimpse of the utility of this field of nursing has to offer for everybody concerned.

A major criticism levelled against the discipline of transcultural nursing pertains to how there is steady diminishing of cultural barriers around the world thanks to the process of globalization. Such critiques contend that all human beings are inherently equal and that paying any kind of attention to a person’s cultural aspects of a patient is to essentially ignore this inherent equality. Further, there could be the presence of emotional bias and subjectivity if a nursing student develops an affinity for a particular culture at the detrimental expense of other cultures, which may severely compromise the quality of nursing that a patient might experience. However, the proponents of transcultural nursing argue that this discipline expands the knowledge of nursing students and it exposes them to the various ways in which different cultures have nursed their sick and how these methods within the context of these cultures helped such patients to fully recover with a positive outcome. They also argue that by getting to know the rich diversity in cultures, nursing students can truly come to appreciate the universality of the human condition by encountering how various cultures dealth with common issues like mortality and sickness and how such an understanding can lead to a better understanding of common human needs pertaining to healthcare.

A concept that is heavily related to the concept of transcultural nursing is transcultural psychology, where the application of psychology is done through the contextualizing of psychological concepts through the lens of culture and how different cultural phenomena are able to have an impact on the psychological make-up of an individual and how understanding these cultural aspects is key to solving psychological problems which an individual might face. Thus the transculturality of nursing and psychology have an overlapping method of approaching the nuances of these respective subjects.