Empowering nurses to render culture-sensitive care though cultural competence training. - University of South Africa, Pretoria

Nursing leaders and educators have been charged by healthcare organizations and accrediting bodies to provide creative evidence-based educational experiences to underpin cultural competent care delivery. This challenge to support professional nursing staff to develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to provide culturally competent nursing care to patients remains a challenge, particulariy in the international setting. Our aim was to establish an focused evidence-based teaching– learning approach for diverse nurisng staff to empower knowledge, skills, and attitudes with regard to the provision of culturally competent care. In this mixed methods research, the cultural competence and confidence (CCC) model, the Transcultural Self-Efficacy Tool (TSET) was used to evaluate the influence of cultural competence education on the transcultural self-efficacy (TSE) perceptions of registered nursing who practice in an internationally diverse setting. Results support that TSE is influenced by formalized education and other learning experiences. Results related to the multivariate analysis of covariance (MANOVA) showed a significantly higher mean score on t2 than on t1 indicating that the education training was successful in improving TSE, and supporting a better level of empowerment as a result at a p level of <0.001 consistently across all three domains. Triangulation methods were used to explore the relationship between the domains of the qualitative and quantitative data, and threaded the care statements to the quantitative TSET questions. This data also supports that training has a positive impact in confidence and empowerment to deliver culture sensitive care, and all participants indicated that cultural competence is important in the healthcare setting for patient care and for individual and group co-worker communication, teamwork as well as health and well-being. Empowerment with education influences self-efficacy changes over time making an important implication for nurse educators to include the ongoing design, implementation, and evaluation of cultural competence educational strategies within healthcare institutions.