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Heritage Assessment
Paul Bockoven
Grand Canyon University
NRS429-V

October 14, 2012

Heritage Assessment
Cultural assessments can be useful tools for a registered nurse to develop adequate plans of care, especially when it comes to education. They have limits however, as not every individual within a certain cultural ‘category’ can be expected to conform the way their heritage may dictate. Assigning a score to any person to predict how they may act, or learn, is contrary to the direction nursing care plans in general have taken. With that in mind, there is some value to using tools like the heritage assessment as a baseline, or starting point. The problem arises because of this particular tool being used to generalize instead of individualize. Developing a sense of a person’s cultural heritage and assigning an ambiguous score has no real meaning when the focus of a care plan is not supposed to take into account anything that is not directly related to the individual for whom it is being tailored. Standards clearly state that the assessment, planning and delivery of a person's care must be centered on the individual, and developed with them or their significant others (Rollin, 2011, p. 541). A person filling out the heritage assessment may, in fact, not adhere to or agree with it’s findings, may not understand it’s significance and as such, this tool could actually lead a caregiver in the wrong direction. The idea that any person who, according to this tool, identifies with a traditional heritage should fit neatly with all others of that culture is misleading at best. Therefore, as a tool to evaluate the needs of a whole person, the Heritage Assessment Tool is severely lacking. In three family interviews these findings were validated, as no link between a positive or negative score could be correlated with these families needs, or behaviors, in the areas of

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