Tools For Community Health Nursing Practice

Tools for Community Health Nursing Practice

Community health nurses should accept that bias, stereotypes, and implicit bias happens within their care setting as one of the first strategies to address the problem. The nurses should assess their feelings, attitude, and behavior toward patients and how they affect the healthcare approach. Of importance, self-awareness and self-reflection promote open, non-judgemental, and mindful traits that aid nurses in identifying, accepting, and understanding biases to offer the best care practices (Crandlemire, 2020). In this case, nurses should be aware of biases and stereotypes to be sensitive to how they feel about people’s appearance, behavior, or mannerisms to provide best practices in patient care.

Nurses should address bias and stereotypes to ensure culturally competent health promotion activities. First, the comprehensive patient assessment allows nurses to know their patients and identify their needs. The nurses should understand the patients’ culture by asking about their beliefs about life, health, and nature. Understanding potential cultural and religious differences will allow nurses to be mindful while offering health education, thus eliminating bias (Lin et al., 2019). Subsequently, nurses should identify and understand what triggers them, including the patient’s race, accent, or even clothing, to address potential biases in patient care.

Nurses should strategically address cultural dissonance and bias to deliver culturally competent care. First, nurses can adopt the LEARN (Listen, Explain, Acknowledge, Recommend, and Negotiate) model to promote cultural competence in patient care (Ladha et al., 2018). Nurses should listen to the patients during health assessments to understand their health condition and explain or convey their perceptions, considering they may have different views based on their culture or ethical background. Acknowledging and being respectful when discussing different views is crucial to establishing therapeutic relationships with patients. Subsequently, the nurse should develop and propose a suitable treatment plan to the patient while encouraging negotiation with the patients and their family members to incorporate cultural-competent dimensions that fit the patients’ perceptions and attitudes to health and healing.

References

Crandlemire, L. A. (2020). Unconscious bias and the impacts on caring: The role of the clinical nursing instructor. International journal for human caring, 24(2), 84-91.

Ladha, T., Zubairi, M., Hunter, A., Audcent, T., & Johnstone, J. (2018). Cross-cultural communication: Tools for working with families and children. Paediatrics & Child Health, 23(1), 66-69.

Lin, M. H., Wu, C. Y., & Hsu, H. C. (2019). Exploring the experiences of cultural competence among clinical nurses in Taiwan. Applied Nursing Research, 45, 6-11.