important for nurses to provide culturally competent care

REPLY 1

It’s important for nurses to provide culturally competent care. It’s important to assess the importance of a client’s culture/ethnicity (and their accompanying beliefs and values) when planning, providing, and evaluating care. Nurses’ practice must incorporate cultural needs and beliefs into their nursing practice to provide care that is individualized for the client and appropriate to the client’s needs (Cultural Awareness and Influences on Health: NCLEX-RN, 2020).

In the Asian culture, there is often a belief that terminally ill patients should not be informed about their prognosis, and many believe that speaking of it may bring bad luck or a poor outcome (Ritter & Graham, 2017, P. 235). Except in emergency situations in which a patient is incapable of making an informed decision, withholding information without the patient’s knowledge or consent is ethically unacceptable (AMA, 2020). After completing a cultural assessment, if the patient holds this belief, I would respect the cultural practice and withhold the information.

The patient would be encouraged to specify preferences regarding the communication of medical information, preferably before the information becomes available (AMA, 2020); it’s important to honor a patient’s request not to receive certain medical information or to convey the information to a designated surrogate, provided these requests appear to represent the patient’s genuine wishes (AMA, 2020). For the family who believes this, “decisions and communication are often considered the responsibility of the oldest male in the family, and can be seen as a moral obligation for that person to act in that capacity” (Ritter & Graham, 2017, P. 235).

For health care providers to balance the patient’s right to know with respect to the cultural practices and beliefs of the family, it’s important to: assess the amount of information the patient is capable of receiving at a given time, and tailor disclosure to meet the patient’s needs and expectations in keeping with the individual’s preferences; Monitor the patient carefully and offer full disclosure when the patient is able to decide whether to