Original Research Article
Year: 2021 | Month: January-March | Volume: 6 | Issue: 1 | Pages: 7-20
Perceptions of Student Nurses about Transcultural Nursing
Olutoyin Elizabeth Okeya
Faculty of Health, Social Care and Medicine, Senior Lecturer, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK.
ABSTRACT
United Kingdom’s rapid increasing diverse population and transcultural nursing care is becoming an important part of nursing and midwifery care, hence the need to investigate the level of student nurses’ perceptions, understanding, awareness, knowledge and skills of transcultural nursing. In order to provide patients with adequate holistic care, the nurse must recognise differences in how diverse ethnic groups and cultures view health and sickness. Quantitative research method was used to investigate the perceptions, understanding and awareness of student nurses and midwifery students in a University in the North West of England. The study was conducted using a questionnaire survey developed by the author. Findings suggest a lack of confidence in meeting the transcultural care needs of the participants’ patients. It was discovered that student nurses’ understanding, knowledge and skills of transcultural nursing was not enhanced to promote cultural nursing care. The participants’ identified a lack of opportunities to work with multi-religion, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic agencies that provide care to culturally diverse patients. These same participants report relatively high awareness of patient's culture as a determining factor in compliance to treatment regime. It is recommended that nurse lecturers find creative educational methods to ensure that student nurses and midwives have sufficient clinical care experience in order to meet all their service users’ cultural needs and promote high standard of transcultural care.
Keywords: Transcultural Nursing, Nursing Theory, Health, Transcultural Knowledge.