PPN101 - week 6

PPN101 - week 6

  • Compare and contrast the concepts of cultural competence, cultural humility and cultural safety.
  • Define and describe the concepts of colonialism, race, racism and antiracism and how they relate to nursing practice.
  • Discuss the multiple contexts of culture in relation to health and illness.
  • Review and examine the equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) statement in the Student Handbook. Discuss the importance of EDI in nursing.

Cultural context of health and illness

  • Culture is the context in which groups of people interpret and define their experiences relevant to life transitions, (birth, illness, and death).
  • The system of meanings by which people make sense of their experiences

Colonialism

  • Occurs when a foreign power rules over a nation and attempts to impose their values and beliefs on the people
  • The takeover of a minority population (often indigenous) by another nation and the resulting unequal relationships between them

Concepts

  • Cultural competence
    • An “ongoing process”
    • Whereby nurses strive to work within the clients cultural context
    • Set of attitudes, skills, behaviours, and policies enabling individuals and organizations to establish effective interpersonal relationships that supersede cultural differences
  • Nurses develop cultural competence rather than possess it

Cultural safety

  • Achieving cultural safety in nursing practice
  • Cultural awareness → cultural sensitivity → cultural safety
  • Cultural awareness and cultural sensitivity are separate concepts and are not interchangeable with cultural safety
  • Achieving cultural safety is a stepwise progression
  • Outcome of cultural safety is that safe care is provided
  • Cultural awareness → a beginning step towards understanding difference that requires self-assessment and reflection about your own personal biases and feelings
  • Cultural sensitivity → the recognition that there are differences between cultures, and these are reflected in ways that different groups communicate/relate to one another
  • Cultural safety → enables safe care to be defined by those who receive that care, and challenges unequal power relations at the level of the individual, family, community, and society

Cultural humility

  • Ongoing lifelong commitment to having the humility to learn from the person and the critical-self-reflection to identify and address biases, prejudices, attitudes, and behaviours in addressing power imbalances within the relationship
  • Principles
    • Life-long learning and critical self-reflection
    • Recognize and challenge power imbalances
    • Institutional accountability

What is race?

  • Race → a socially constructed category used to classify humankind according to common ancestry and is reliant on differentiation by physical characteristics
  • The concept of race has no basis in biological reality and therefore has no meaning independent of its social definitions
  • The ideology of race has become embedded in our identities, institutions and culture and is used as a basis for discrimination and domination

Racism and racialization

  • Racism is a complex system of racial hierarchies and inequities
  • An ideology that either directly or indirectly asserts that one group is inherently superior to others
  • Racialization is the process of categorizing people into categories that are constructed as different and unequal in ways that lead to negative social, economic and political impacts
  • Being antiracist results from your own conscious decisions to make frequent and equitable choices daily

What do nurses do

  • Nurses take leadership to prevent embedded racism from causing further harm to their patients and communities
  • Nurses effort to promote social justice and equity are not only about developing policies but rather their efforts are accomplished through day to day practices, conversations with others, and interactions with clients, families, communities, and leaders
  • Equity → the situation in which everyone is treated fairly according to their needs
  • Diversity → the fat of there being people of many different groups in society
  • Inclusion → the act of the allowing many different types of people to do something and treating them fairly and equally

Culture related to health and illness

  • Nurses must commit to equity
  • Seek to understand themselves and others, and the context of people's lives
  • Analyze vulnerability, rather than locating it within individuals or groups
  • Promote practices and environments appropriate for the most marginalized
  • Treat problems as practice problems, not individual problems