Culture and Nursing

Today I am goint to talk about culture and nursing and how culture can influence nursing cares. Over time, nursing has changed, has evolved from being a mere application of specific techniques to open its field of action to other areas, such as prevention and development. The presence of a new type of emigration meant that nursing professionals should attend to and care for an increasingly heterogeneous group of patients. As one of the possible answers to these new needs arises, in the United States of the 50s, the so-called "transcultural nursing" that tries to unite the practice of nursing with the knowledge of anthropology.

Transcultural nursing is, in the words of Madeleine Leininger, its founder: a "formal area of study and work focused on care and based on the culture, beliefs of health or illness, values and practices of people , to help them maintain or recover their health, cope with their disabilities or death. " However, this definition does not help much to understand exactly the meaning of this area of knowledge.

What does cross-cultural nursing mean? Nursing can be defined as the set of professional activities aimed at the care, promotion, maintenance or restoration of optimal health for both the person and society, based on theoretical and methodological foundations. Nursing can be considered, therefore, a social discipline since it deals with both the individual and the health of the group, it is a profession at the service of the community.

That is to say, nursing combines two important aspects: the medical technique and the treatment of the patient. For the health professional, the human organism resembles a machine that must be maintained and repaired at times. But there is something important that should not be lost sight of, and it is the patient's interaction with their own disease. He must collaborate in the prevention and fight against the disease, and this is where the treatment with the patient makes sense, in the fundamental interrelation that is established between the nurses and the patient.

Also the existence of new diseases or those that have acquired greater amplitude as for example the anorexia, of a concept of different disease emerged, among others, as a result of AIDS, in which the antibody carrier is not sick but is not healthy, but it is he himself who constructs his own concept of normality. All this requires new types of care in which both the psychological aspects of the individual and the cultural aspects have to do much, while the needs are different according to the social group in question.

As you can see it is vital for health care to integrate nursing and culture in next posts I will go deep in transcultural nursing.