Cultural care diversity refers to the differences in meanings, values, or acceptable mode of care within or between different groups of people. Culture influences every aspect of human life, including beliefs, values, and customs regarding health care (Edelman & Mandle, 2010) as nurse it is our duty to be culturally competent in order to provide our patients with the best holistic care we can. Additionally, I believe it’s not only by understanding someone’s culture that as a nurse I can be able to offer a patient teaching that she can actually use.
Working as a nurse in pediatrics, I was faced with a situation where a mother of three kids was always in the hospital (almost every two weeks), each time she came there was an issue for instance, on one occasion one of her kids had burn wounds, and in another occasion another kid was having blood stool and so forth. Following the stories and looking at the flow of information they found out something was missing. To make matters worse, on every visit she wanted a letter from the hospital manager to get the husband out of work and send him home to take care of sick family. Coming from the same culture as the lady (Africa), I talked to her and found out that the husband was making the wife induce illness to the kids or make herself sick so that he could be sent back home from the army. According to the culture from where the woman came from, women and children are not allowed to speak up, and the only person who talked in the room was the husband. Thus, even if she was not okay with the induced illnesses, she had to agree with what her husband told her to do. It took almost a year of regular visit for the lady to open up and tell what the husband was doing to his family. Following the above example where women are not allowed to speak up about her illness as we can see the lady was emotionally bothered and scared,