Importance of Developing Nurse-Patient - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages Upon examining the impact of cultural differences with regards to the overall team performance, the study of Strauch (2010) revealed that cultural factors could lead to team errors, especially when the team members have a high level of workload and are highly stressed during the operational phase. In line with this, Wachtler, Brorsson, & Troein (2006) confirmed that cultural differences between the health care professionals and the patients could cause the general practitioners to wrong diagnosis and treatment. As an indirect result of general practitioners’ wrong diagnoses, nurses may end up administering wrong medications to patients with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Developing awareness regarding the patients’ cultural beliefs and tradition is an important part of developing a nurse-patient therapeutic relationship. Ethnocentricity refers to the practice of believing that a person’s ethnic or cultural background, such as language, behaviour, religion, and customs, is centrally important as compared to the ethnic or cultural background of other people (Andersen & Taylor, 2006, p. 67). In other words, ethnocentrism views one cultural background as more superior to the others.
Given that strong ethnocentrism on the part of the health care professionals could oftentimes result in professional negligence related to misdiagnosis, mistreatment, and the under-treatment of culturally diverse patients around the world (Greipp, 1995), nurses should improve their knowledge about the impact of different cultural background, beliefs, and traditions in the quality of care given to the patients. In other words, factors that could promote the development of a therapeutic milieu in caring for patients includes the habit of respecting the patients’ cultural background, customs, norms, values, and relationship issues which could positively affect the ability of the patients to recover from their illnesses.

Caring for sick individuals is not limited to the administering of medications, symptom management, and personal care. Depending on the health status of each patient, some patients may end up becoming partially or totally dependent on nurses when performing their own activities of daily living (ADL) such as walking, bathing, dressing, and feeding. ...Download file to see next pages Read More