TRANSCULTURAL NURSING: MANAGING DIVERSITY
Managing diversity in contemporary nursing practice involves pluralism in both the ranks of professional nurses and patient populations. Increasing cultural pluralism within the nursing profession emphasizes the need to both understand and manage group processes in contemporary healthcare organizations. The delegation of autonomy to groups within nursing practice empowers nurses within groups to develop the strategies that effectively integrate pluralistic perspectives. The integration of culturally differing perspectives within healthcare organizations is accomplished through the process of group dynamics. For the nurse manager developing care practice plans for members of foreign cultural groups residing within the United States, intervention strategies designed to promote self-concept and role functions that will positively affect adaptation will be the most difficult to develop. Persuading such patients that is important for their own health to become actively involved in decisions related to her or his own personal care must occur in such a way that additional tension is not created for the patient. Creating a stronger self-concept for such patients; however, should be a primary goal of such interventions.
While the United States has long been considered to be a nation of immigrants, the bulk of the newcomers during most of the nation's history were from the various European cultures with which their predecessors also identified. Beginning in the 1960s, however, the proportion of Europeans among immigrants to the United States has decreased steadily. Thus, an ever increasing number of ethnic communities have developed and continue to develop in this country whose social mores are quite different from the European cultural values that tend to characterized the behaviors of the majority of the American population.
Increasing cultural pluralism emphasizes the need to both und...