I am a nursing student assigned a case study about a southeast asian woman in the hospital. I need to come up with explanations for her behavior such as guarding herself, answering all questions with "yes", and her families uninvolvement with her care. Also I am asked to come up with appropriate interventions to provide competent care. I am not given a specific country or religion. Thank you for your help.

-- Jessica Patti (jpatti7@msn.com), April 07, 2003

Answers

Greetings Jessica,

From your question, we gather the point of the assignment is to come up with a cultural competent nursing plan of care. First, Asia is a region, a continent. Viet Nam and China are also countries located in Asia. The Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese are all Asians but each has its own culture. While there exist similarities in cultures, there are also so many variances from one country to another that need to be understood. In addition, keep in mind that the assessment step of the nursing process is extremely important especially in inter ethnic relationships between patients and nurses. To gather the necessary data about a patient, the nurse needs to view the patient in the contexts within which he/she exists. Cultural beliefs and practices influence nurse-patient interactions, communication, and patients expectations of their nursing care. It is hard to do with every patient but we find it helps if we can see the patient in the context of his life, not in what we consider the artificial environment of the clinic, hospital, or ER. Before you can begin to explain a patients behaviors in a cross cultural context, there is crucial information you need to gather, things like family dynamics, level of acculturation , social organization to mention a few. We believe that approaching this assignment with limited information (weak assessment) will unfortunately often result in misleading and often dangerous stereotyping. We would be interested in viewing the case study you refer to; maybe you can post it and elicit further responses.

The following are sites that might help your search:

Cultural Profiles Project http://cwr.utoronto.ca/cultural/english/

Cultural Assessment http://culturediversity.org/assesmnt.htm

Good luck

-- Victor (victor@culturediversity.org), April 11, 2003.