Two Standards of Culturally Competent Nursing Care: Social Justice & Critical Reflection - Research Paper

Introduction

The two standards selected from the list of standards of practice for culturally competent nursing care are social justice and critical reflection. Social justice regards the promotion of justice for all and guides nursing decisions that affect patients, their families, the community, as well as other healthcare professionals. On its part, critical reflection regards the retrospection of the values, beliefs, and cultural heritage while creating awareness on how such qualities impact on the balance that is needed to ensure holistic nursing care (Goulet, Larue, & Alderson, 2016). Social justice stems from the need for impartiality and the pursuit for objectivity which are required to sustain management-level nursing. It is aimed at ensuring that fairness, equity, tolerance, respect for life, and human dignity are maintained at all time.

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Critical reflection is essential for the understanding of the fundamental cultural values for oneself and others, which helps to ensure collaborative nursing care, which involves the patient, their family, community, and the entire population. It begins with the development of self-awareness, which directs one to be conscious of their cultural beliefs. Based on such beliefs, it becomes possible for one to analyze the feelings of the patient and their attitude towards nursing care. The approach provides a basis for critiquing one's beliefs and values and examine the points of conflict or convergence. Social justice, on the other hand, helps to design strategies to achieve fair treatment that transcends the various differentiating factors among patients (Joyce et al., 2017). These factors include race, ethnicity, economic status, age, citizenship, and disability. This approach is essential, considering that ethical principles vary from one culture to another, so a broader approach is required to expand the nurse's perspective to provide treatment that is consistent and unbiased.

How Each Standard is Used

Social justice finds usage in nursing practice environments in many ways. Foremost, it helps in the design and advocacy of policies which help to uphold human rights. The practice of social justice in nursing practice requires fair treatment of patients, families, and communities. It ensures the focus on unifying factors and the disregard for divisive elements which may distract nursing practice from achieving the desired goals (Yanicki, Kushner, & Reutter, 2015). Every human being deserves prevention, care, and cure and the integration of social justice elements within practice helps to achieve such nursing care. More importantly, the understanding of social justice helps to broaden the scope of nursing practice. A balance that determines the prioritization of nursing practice for each deserving person is achievable when elements of social justice are incorporated into nursing practice. Consequently, it is a fundamental part of the sustenance of quality nursing practice for all.

Critical reflection is an integral element that needs to be incorporated into nursing practice to achieve the desired cultural competence in nursing care. Foremost, it is a prerequisite for the understanding of the cultural values and beliefs of the nurse and the evaluation of such cultural underpinnings with those of the patient, families, and communities that demand the nursing care. The resulting cultural awareness helps to understand the feelings of the patient and the response and level of support that is likely to be recorded from the family and community that receives the care (Redmond, 2017). The process of evaluation also helps to address possible conflicts between the values of the nurse and those of the patient, which may hinder the desired therapeutic relationship and effective patient care outcomes.

How These Policies Might be Effectively Implemented

The implementation of social justice within a healthcare environment requires the introduction of organizational culture. It is essential to begin from the point of knowledge that every individual that is involved in nursing practice comes from a unique cultural background, and that cultural conflicts exist right from practice (Joyce et al., 2017). Consequently, it is essential that a single code of conduct is established, which spells out standard practice procedures which each nurse must adhere to. It is vital that each nurse understands that they are the custodians of the professionalism that is desired and that however, they choose to discharge their responsibilities determines the outcome and influences their continuous interaction with their patients. On top of the ethical standards of practice, there must be an accompanying list of consequences as punitive measures for the lack of compliance. This approach is likely to provide an environment of checks and balances, which should deter the unethical practice.

There are many ways that critical reflection can be made part of nursing practice. As a starting point, all the stakeholders require to be encouraged to apply cultural congruence standards which are grounded on critical reflection. A continuous process that involves each stakeholder in the application of these cultural congruence nursing care practice is then required to integrate these processes into the practice (Lor, Crooks, & Tluczek, 2016). Once there is an understanding of and positive reception of these approaches, policies need to be developed which demonstrate the relevance of personal values in proper nursing care practice. Once these policies are established and adopted, programs need to be established which expand stakeholder understanding of the beliefs and cultures of various individuals and how beneficial, such understanding is to the desired care.

References

Goulet, M. H., Larue, C., & Alderson, M. (2016, April). Reflective practice: A comparative dimensional analysis of the concept in nursing and education studies. In Nursing forum(Vol. 51, No. 2, pp. 139-150).Retrieved from https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/46546757/Goulet_Larue_Alderson_2016.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1558119302&Signature=SU1KwQPu3PCXUdzhz9K94Eepm%2FE%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DReflective_Practice_A_Comparative_Dimens.pdf

Joyce, B., Brown-Schott, N., Hicks, V., Johnson, R. G., Harmon, M., & Pilling, L. (2017). The global health nursing imperative: Using competency-based analysis to strengthen accountability for population-focused practice, education, and research. Annals of global health, 83(3-4), 641-653. Retrieved from 0 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aogh.2017.05.006

Lor, M., Crooks, N., & Tluczek, A. (2016). A proposed model of person-, family-, and culture-centered nursing care. Nursing Outlook, 64(4), 352-366. Retrieved from https://daneshyari.com/article/preview/2678075.pdf

Redmond, B., (2017). Reflection in action: Developing reflective practice in health and social services. Routledge.

Yanicki, S. M., Kushner, K. E., & Reutter, L. (2015). Social inclusion/exclusion as matters of social (in) justice: a call for nursing action. Nursing Inquiry, 22(2), 121-133. doi: 10.1111/nin.12076.