Cultural Competence

Cultural competence
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Name of institution
5th June 2014
Introduction
In today’s world, nurses are providing care, education and case management to a diversified population of patients who are faced with cultural, linguistic and health literacy barriers (Kate, 2009). Therefore, nurses are supposed to facilitate the connection between health literacy, language, and patient culture to increase health outcome of their profession in a diversified population. This is achieved through cultural competence where nurses are able to acquire skills and attitude to overcome these barriers. This essay will, therefore, discuss these factors that affect nurses when they are caring for patients with chronic illness, sensory impairment and the end life in Native Americans. In addition, the essay will look into the required recommendations that can be made by nurses to overcome these barriers affecting these people.
As stated above, the major challenge to most patients is literacy skills that are affected by culture and language. As such, the Native America requires that for one to be health literate, he or she must apply relevant skills like reading, and writing in English effectively. For Native Americans, most of them do not know how to communicate in English and for those who communicate in English may not understand the vocabulary used in health care system. This poses a big challenge to nurses, as there is a communication barrier.
Nevertheless, decision making amongst the patient is another challenge that face nurses during their profession. When treating patients with chronic diseases, they may be restricted to take in some foods or forced to do some things that are against their cultural and spiritual beliefs. Whether the patient will be treated or not, it will depend on the decision they will make such as when to seek medical care and whether to follow the given instructions or not. As such, for Native Americans, it is assumed that individuals are responsible for their own health-related decision making thus there is no need of consulting the family members (Kate, 2009).
In additional, most people view death as the failure of nurses to treat the illness causing the death. The same case applies even in America where they view death as the failure of nurses but in the real sense death is part of life. In order to overcome this belief, there is an implementation of aged care project where elderly people are taken care of by nurses (RACGP, 2011). Although aging is related with increasing levels of disability, most elderly people have the belief that their health as being good or excellent.
Lastly, for the nurses facing all these challenges, the RN should ensure that cultural self-awareness is done so as these people realize their own culture and linguistic assumptions biases. More so, they should encou...