Communicating with culturally and linguistically diverse patients in an acute care setting: nurses’ experiences☆
Section snippets
Background
Australia is a multicultural society whose cultural pluralism is recognised and addressed in government papers (Roach, 1997). Within Greater Western Sydney Region 30% of the population is composed of ethnic minority groups with some quite substantial culturally diverse consumer groups in some area health services. This cultural variation has marked implications for health professionals particularly nurses as they could be considered to have the most direct and continuous contact with patients
Cross-cultural nursing practice
As multiculturalism and acceptance of a pluralist society with different values and traditions is current policy in Australia (Garrett and Lin, 1990; Roach, 1997) nurses need to be culturally competent to providing culturally congruent care (Giger and Davidhizar, 1999; Leininger, 1995). In today's borderless societies cultural competence is a necessity (Purnell, 2000). A four-phase process outlined in Howell's (1982) model of competence describes the development of this accomplishment. The
Research approach
This study explored and described nurses’ experiences of communicating with CLD patient population and their families in an acute care hospital with a high non-English speaking background patient population. An interpretive-descriptive design in the qualitative tradition (Thorne et al., 1997) has been selected to address the question as it can capture the multiplicity of nurses’ experiences in an acute care hospital and focus on the elements of communicating with CLD patients.
Sample
Twenty-three
Findings
The nurses interviewed in this study came from two distinct clinical areas, general and midwifery. Twelve were certified midwives and 11 were registered nurses. Their experiences ranged from 5 to 25 years with the median being 10 years. Thirteen of the nurses were from Anglo-centric backgrounds and ten were from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. These backgrounds were Asia, South America, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Europe and indigenous Australia. Five of the nurses not from Anglo-centric
Discussion
Nurses indicated that accessing interpreters was most usually successful for main CLD patient groups. However, for the minor CLD patient groups it was more difficult as were weekends and night shifts. This highlights the administrative difficulty of delivering linguistic services to a CLD patient population who speaks many different languages. Nurses found that cultural and linguistic diverse groups who had recently arrived in Australia; for example, Somali and Bosnian groups, lacked the
Acknowledgements
To the nurses and midwives who so willingly agreed to share their experiences of caring for CLD patient groups. To the Acting Director of Nursing, Ms Jan Tweedie, who supported the study. To the bilingual health workers, Ms Nawal Amahesh and Ms May Chung for their support of the study. To the University of Western Sydney for study funding by a Research Seed Grant 2001 of $4107.
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Ethics approvals for this study were obtained from The University of Western Sydney Human Research Ethics Committee and The Western Sydney Area Health Service Human Research Ethics Committee. The University of Western Sydney funded the study with a Research Seed Grant 2001 of $4107.