Diversity Awareness and Cultural Competency in Nursing Care (Essay Sample)

Name
1 Describe how Christy can handle the situation better the next time she encounters a Romani patient.
2 Reflect upon what have you learned after completing the Learning Activities. Your comments must show thoughtful reflection about how you have assessed your own personal development as you strive for cultural competence.
3 Identify at least one thing an organization can do to improve its cultural competence.
Introduction
The contemporary world has gone global where people of different customs, beliefs, language and religion have to live together. There is a need therefore for a culturally competent nurse who recognizes that nursing care should be delivered in a culturally sensitive manner. This is essential considering that, cultural values describe human interactions and roles within the community. Similarly, a culture of a people determines their behavior as well as their values and also other factors such as occupation, education, age, gender, social class, level of acculturation and personal believes also influences one’s behavior. A culturally competent nurse should therefore be guided by the principles of human rights and social justice in delivering competent care (Jeffrey’s, 2008). In this paper I review the nursing care given by Christy (Irish Nurse) to a Romani patient.
Christy seems to have many issues with the family members of her patient. She failed to understand why the relatives of her patient had to remain in the patient’s room all the time. In addition, other relatives had camped out in the waiting room and in the hall. The family members also had insisted on remaining in the room as Christy sponge bathed the patient and they never seemed to appreciate what she was doing. These and other complains from Christy were due to the fact that she approached her client and the relatives entirely from her own perspective neglecting the patient’s family perspective. All she did was guided by diversity self-awareness because she was able to reflect on her own cultural identity, realize her cultural values and beliefs and that’s why she had no complain while caring for patients from her community. However, she failed to embrace diversity awareness which means being in a continuous and an active conscious process of recognizing similarities and differences between various cultural groups (Gilbert, 2003).
If Christy was to put into consideration diversity awareness, she would have engaged the family of her patient through enquiring the meaning of their actions/ behavior in a polite and friendly manner. Through enquiry she would have known that the Romani family comprises of three generations having six to fifteen relatives. This explains why Christy complained she could not understand why her client’s relatives camped at the reception and in the hall. By understanding the structure of her client’s family, Christy wouldn’t have had any issue with the number of family