Culturally Competent Nursing Care

Cultural competency training is being widely promoted as a means to improve the quality of health care for ethnic minorities. However, relatively little work has been done to develop a valid and reliable measure of cultural competency or to investigate the relationship between cultural competence and the quality of health care. (p. 1)

Indeed, Lipson, Demi, Blaney, Stern, Schultz and Lenburg (2000) report that the notion of cultural competence has been applied to health care in almost every area of medicine. These include clinical areas such as diabetes education; critical care, and transplantation. Developmental and life-cycle areas such as physician-patient relationship in pediatrics and adolescent health, work with young children and families, care of the elderly and even parent-child relationships are, according to the authors, also being approached using cultural competence models.

Lipson et. al (2000) also report that cultural competence theories and models have been applied to psychiatric services including treatment programs for partner abuse and drug abuse, the patient-therapist relationship, and child and adolescent psychiatric residency training . Further, these models have been strongly emphasized in terms of the need to arrive at a proper ethnic and cognitive match between therapist and patient in psychotherapy and counseling.

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ses working in diverse settings. It was found that Cronbach's alpha coefficients, ranged from .86 to .98 in six studies. However, after review of the research, the authors stated that: Further research is needed using consistent reporting practices and sufficient predictor variables to draw further conclusions regarding the scale's psychometric properties (p. 180). Bernal and Froman (1993) conducted a factor and regression analysis on the Cultural Self-Efficacy Scale in order to determine the underlying conceptual structure, and relationship to demographic variables. It was noted that in very early studies of a sample of 190 community health nurses, the computed internal consistency coefficient was .97 which was said to indicate fairly high reliability. In the conducted factor analysis, the authors reported that the four factor structure was conceptually meaningful and accounted for 90 percent of the total scale variance. Moreover, regression analyses showed significant relationships between perceptions of efficacy and the demographic variables of race, education, and experience. The Cultural Self-Efficacy Scale has strong heuristic value as it has been used in several studies. For example, in some very recent research, Kar
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Approximate Word count = 7179
Approximate Pages = 29 (250 words per page)

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