Literature Search Health, Medicine, Nursing Essay Paper

Self-knowledge and Understanding: Step in Achieving Cultural Competence
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Question One
Self-knowledge and understanding is a critical step in becoming culturally competent because, through it, nurses and healthcare professionals become aware of their background, cultural values, and biases. Once nurses are aware of their cultural background and biases towards people of different cultures, they can recognize the cultural differences and similarities of their patients. This is an important step towards developing cultural awareness (Cai, 2016). When healthcare professionals have sufficient self-knowledge and understanding, they are in a position to understand different cultural groups. As a result, they can develop interventions that are specifically focused on the health problems of diverse patients (Cai, 2016). Also, self-knowledge provides nurses with a basis towards becoming culturally competent because once they identify their cultural limitations, they can find ways of addressing those limitations.
The cultural self-assessment exercise has had an impact on my personal and professional values as they relate to diverse cultures. Through this exercise, I became more aware of my biases and attitudes towards people whose culture is different from mine. As a result, I am now working towards understanding other cultures by engaging people from different cultures and participating in activities that expose me to diverse cultures. I believe that this will positively impact my interactions with patients because as revealed by Power, et al. (2015), understanding the culture of diverse groups helps in improving the health of these groups. I will be more conscious and culturally sensitive to all my patients and this will help me build trusting relationships with them.
References
BIBLIOGRAPHY \l 1033 Cai, D. (2016). A Concept Analysis of Cultural Competence. International Journal of Nursing Sciences, 1-6. /science/article/pii/S2352013216300795
Power, T., Virdun, C., Sherwood, J., Parker, N., Balen, J., Gray, J., et al. (2015). REM: A Collaborative Framework for Building Indigenous Cultural Competence. Journal if Transcultural Nursing, 1-8.
Question Two
When it comes to maternal and infant health, diverse cultures have different practices. The study by Asiodu, Waters, Dailey, and Lyndon (2017) examined breastfeeding practices among first-time African-American mothers and indicated that while breastfeeding is an important practice for both child and maternal health, most African-American mothers do not breastfeed their infants exclusively. The study examined some of the factors that influenced breastfeeding decisions among African-American mothers. Most of the participants in the study revealed that growing up, they never saw African-American women breastfeeding, a factor that was attributed to wet-nursing during slavery. However, they acknowledged the importance of breastfeeding and reported that having a social support system influences their decisions to breastfeed. Another factor that influenced their breastfeeding practices is access to breastfeeding resources. The study concluded that it is important to improve breastfeeding practices among African...