Culturally Competent Nursing in an Ever Changing Diverse World Essay Example for Free

Culturally Competent Nursing in an Ever Changing Diverse World Essay In nursing and healthcare the issue of culture is more pronounced than anywhere else. This is because many people various ethnic, religious, racial and cultural backgrounds come forth to hospitals and healthcare centres in search of health solutions. Due to these cultural disparities, patients often fail to receive quality services because of practices that are lacking in cultural competence. Cultural competence in nursing and healthcare refers to the efficiency with which a healthcare provider is able to offer quality service in a cross-cultural setting thus enhancing the system’s or institution’s capacity to function in effective manners (Dolhun, E. P. et al 2003). Culture influences an individual’s values, perceptions, beliefs and opinions. It influences how patients respond to healthcare givers and the medication prescribed to them. Therefore it is very important that nurses and other medical practitioners seek to improve their awareness towards the issues raised by cultural diversity in order to improve on service delivery. This paper examines ways in which a nurse can be more culturally competent. It also examines the opportunities in the work place and nursing school that requires culturally focused health practices. Additionally the paper discusses the issues of self-assessment and client assessment that is geared towards the delivery of culturally competent health solutions. Importance of Culture to Nursing. The US is comprised of the most culturally diverse population. A big percentage of the world’s ethnic, religious and cultural groups are represented in this population. This has created a most unique opportunity as well as challenge to many organizations in the service delivery sector. This is because people from all cultures get ill at one point in time and they have to seek treatment. Nurses are thus presented with patients from very diverse cultural backgrounds. Culture influences how different people will respond to the different ways of health service delivery, interventions and treatment (Dolhun, E. P et al. 2003). It is therefore important for nurses to move towards achieving cultural competence in order to effectively deal with the challenges that come with the cultural reality. Because of the demographic situation in America service providers are under pressure to provide more culturally correct services. The nursing profession cannot be left behind and therefore the need to comply with the changing needs is overwhelming. Language limitations are also another issue of concern in attaining cultural competence. Ethical Factor One ethical principle that guides nurses in their endeavour to provide culturally appropriate care is the appreciating that everyone regardless of their cultural persuasion is entitled to receive quality health care. Cultural differences can influence the caregiver’s prejudices and bias towards a patient (Galanti G. A. 1997). In a similar way a patient can misconstrue the caregiver’s actions and words. This can serve to lower the quality of care given to this particular patient. Professional ethics require that there be no form of discrimination in the provision of health care but in a situation where there is prejudice on either party, then the quality of care is compromised. Similarly what is considered ethical may have serious consequences when viewed from a cultural context. A fitting example is when the doctor feels obliged to divulge some information to a patient or a certain member of the family, because in some cultures it is believed that giving certain information to a sick person is unacceptable, the doctors ‘ethical’ actions may be viewed in very bad light Nurse’s responsibility Nurses are usually supposed to care for the general well being of a patient, they ought to be able to understand and empathize with the patient in order to cater for their physical and emotional needs. On an individual level, a nurse has a responsibility to learn the practices that are in accordance to cultural competence. It is important that nurses should have an attitude that goes further than just learning acceptable cultural behaviours. Nurses must be motivated by compassion to the patients and driven by moral responsibility (Tervalon M. Murray-Garcia J. 1998). This allows them to display a genuine concern and is thus motivated to internalize harmonious attitudes towards achieving cultural competence. In a hospital setting a nurse is required to be able to anticipate the issues that may arise due to cultural disparities and lack of proficiency in certain languages. They are also to understand the others’ points of view as well as appreciating the strengths and weaknesses of these points of view. In addition to this, respecting the cultural differences is key to the ability to provide culturally appropriate care. Since the issues raised by cultural diversity are multi-faceted in nature, they require a holistic approach that calls for a total overhaul in the nurses’ ways of thinking. There is no one culture that is the standard of what is good or bad and therefore an open mind is important as nurses move towards delivering health care that exemplifies cultural competence. Achieving this kind of competence is only possible if one comes to self-awareness and recognizes their own values, beliefs, opinions, prejudices and biases (Dolhun, E. P. 2003). From here, they can be able to understand how they respond to different points of view from other. Inorder to come to self-awareness one needs to examine their own cultural and environmental backgrounds. An underlying ethnocentricity is part most people where one is protective and to an extent defensive when it comes to cultural differences (Switzer, G. E et al 1998). However in the nursing practice each nurse should be flexible and work towards developing skills of responding to varied cultural settings and situations. Nursing Schools Similarly in nursing schools one is required to meet most of the aforementioned standards. In addition to that communication skills are developed in school. Learning to communicate effectively in a cultural context entails being open-minded, respectful and shunning any form of prejudice or bias (Robins, L. et al 1998). It is a great opportunity to learn form and about other cultures. Other communication skills that are essential are listening skills that enable one to establish a rapport with the others. Language skills also play an important role in communication and as such each student nurse has a responsibility to learn other languages. Ofcourse it is not possible to learn all the languages there are but one can do their best and that is what is required of them. In the same way nurses should have skills that would enable them to assess the patient in a cultural context. This would entail finding out as much detail on the patient as possible. It would help to understand their ethnic background, socio-economic class, religion, age group and other social entities that they identify with. Learning about their experiences could also aid in establishing biases. Impact of culture on health care In the year 2010 more than 45% of all patients in the US will come from minority cultures. This is due to immigration that is the greatest contributor to the cultural diversity (Tervalon M. Murray-Garcia J. 1998). The health sector has realized the reality of these facts and medical practitioners are now given incentives to encourage them to take up learning on cultural diversity. This is changing the entire medical profession. Many initiatives have been put in place in order to bridge health differences that exist between minority groups and the white Americans. The existence of cultural difference may impact negatively on the care given. Cultural factor do affect the response to the different methods of treatment and diagnosis. Some ideas are perceived differently in different cultures and in some extreme cases family members can react in ways that may seem bizarre in the western world. Conclusion The issue of culture is increasingly attaining great importance with the ever-changing cultural mixture. The provision of healthcare is now taking cognizance of the effects of culture on the delivery of these vital services. It has been realized that cultural differences have been an impact on the quality of care given. Nurses and other medical practitioner are now under increased pressure to attain cultural competence in order to achieve high standards of quality. This paper opines the achievement of an all round cultural competence is a long journey. It will take a collective as well as an individual effort to achieve. Nurses have a personal responsibility to seek to understand the cultural factor. Additionally each one of them needs to appreciate their moral duty to seek self-awareness inorder to understand their own behaviour in response to other people with a differing opinion. Respect and a non-judgemental attitude are important if one is to overcome the ethnocentricity that is part of every human being. This awareness cultivates interest and inquiry. Once this point has been reached cultural differences will be viewed as learning opportunities that will spur personal growth. Reference Dolhun, E. P. Munoz, C. and Grumbach, K. (2003). Cross-cultural education in U. S. medical schools: Development of an assessment tool. Academic Medicine. Galanti G. A. (1997). Caring for Patients from Different Cultures: Case studies from American hospitals. 2nd ed. University of Philadelphia Press. Philadelphia, PA. Riddick S. (1998). Improving access for limited English-speaking consumers: A review of strategies in health care settings. J Health Care Poor Underserved. Supp vol 9: Robins, L. S. Alexander, G. L. , Wolf, F. M. , Fantone, J. C. , Davis, W. K. (1998). Development and evaluation of an instrument to assess medical students cultural attitudes. Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association, Switzer, G. E. Scholle, S. H. , Johnson, B. A. , Kelleher, K. J. (1998). The Client Cultural Competence Inventory: An instrument for assessing cultural competence in behavioral managed care organizations. Journal of Child and Family Studies, Tervalon M. Murray-Garcia J. (1998). Cultural humility versus cultural competence: A critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education. J Health Care Poor Underserved.

Pro Assisted Suicide Essay -- Death With Dignity euthanasia

Death With Dignity Today, American society is obsessed with the young and successful and their endless pursuit of beauty, fame, and fortune. People are bombarded with images of youth in movies, music, and ads for ordinary items such as toothpaste. Advertisers create the illusion that people can forever defer death by plastering ?anti-aging? across drugstore aisles to sell their products. In the search for eternal youth, people become desensitized to the importance of life?s inevitable end. Every day, countless people quietly pass away after long and painful struggles with terminal illnesses, and their loved ones are often reduced to helpless observers. Terminally ill patients are not merely a statistic; they are mothers, fathers, children, friends, and lovers who leave behind many distraught loved ones in death. By continuing to prohibit assisted suicide, the law denies many terminally ill patients the peaceful death they desire. Instead, patients must waste away slowly and endure constant pain, unless they have powerful and expensive medications to dull their senses. However, no amount of medication can remedy emotional pain, and patients sometime feel helpless and alone because death is their only release from suffering (Girsh 3). The law cannot rightfully ignore the special circumstances of terminal illnesses and deny people a dignified death simply because they retain brain function. Terminally ill patients need an option to prevent spending their final days, months, or years painfully deteriorating as they approach their inevitable deaths. Throughout the controversy, the public has focused on moral aspects of assisted suicide and overlooked the fact that one form has already been in practice for nine ye... ...situation of terminally ill patients over their personal convictions and abolish the boundaries keeping them from having a peaceful end to their lives. Works Cited ?2-to-1 Majorities Continue to Support Rights to Both Euthanasia and Doctor-Assisted Suicide.? The Harris Poll 9 January 2002 Death with Dignity National Center. 2006. 27 March 2006 . Girsh, Faye. ?Patients Should Be Given More Control Over Their Deaths.? USA Today March 2000. Levinson, Sanford. ?Assisted Suicide Should be Legalized.? The Nation 21 July 1997. Oregon Department of Human Services Report, 1994-1005. Oregon Department of Human Services. 2006. 27 March 2006 ?Physician Assisted Suicide: Legislative Statute.? Oregon Department of Human Services. 2006. 21 March 2006 . Pro Assisted Suicide Essay -- Death With Dignity euthanasia Death With Dignity Today, American society is obsessed with the young and successful and their endless pursuit of beauty, fame, and fortune. People are bombarded with images of youth in movies, music, and ads for ordinary items such as toothpaste. Advertisers create the illusion that people can forever defer death by plastering ?anti-aging? across drugstore aisles to sell their products. In the search for eternal youth, people become desensitized to the importance of life?s inevitable end. Every day, countless people quietly pass away after long and painful struggles with terminal illnesses, and their loved ones are often reduced to helpless observers. Terminally ill patients are not merely a statistic; they are mothers, fathers, children, friends, and lovers who leave behind many distraught loved ones in death. By continuing to prohibit assisted suicide, the law denies many terminally ill patients the peaceful death they desire. Instead, patients must waste away slowly and endure constant pain, unless they have powerful and expensive medications to dull their senses. However, no amount of medication can remedy emotional pain, and patients sometime feel helpless and alone because death is their only release from suffering (Girsh 3). The law cannot rightfully ignore the special circumstances of terminal illnesses and deny people a dignified death simply because they retain brain function. Terminally ill patients need an option to prevent spending their final days, months, or years painfully deteriorating as they approach their inevitable deaths. Throughout the controversy, the public has focused on moral aspects of assisted suicide and overlooked the fact that one form has already been in practice for nine ye... ...situation of terminally ill patients over their personal convictions and abolish the boundaries keeping them from having a peaceful end to their lives. Works Cited ?2-to-1 Majorities Continue to Support Rights to Both Euthanasia and Doctor-Assisted Suicide.? The Harris Poll 9 January 2002 Death with Dignity National Center. 2006. 27 March 2006 . Girsh, Faye. ?Patients Should Be Given More Control Over Their Deaths.? USA Today March 2000. Levinson, Sanford. ?Assisted Suicide Should be Legalized.? The Nation 21 July 1997. Oregon Department of Human Services Report, 1994-1005. Oregon Department of Human Services. 2006. 27 March 2006 ?Physician Assisted Suicide: Legislative Statute.? Oregon Department of Human Services. 2006. 21 March 2006 .

Blown to Bits Essay

Technology has rapidly advanced, affecting standards on privacy, telecommunications, and criminal law. Every day, we encounter unexpected consequences of data flows that could not have happened a few years ago. Due to the bits explosion, the world changed very suddenly. Almost everything is stored in a computer somewhere. Court records, grocery purchases, precious family photos, radio programs†¦ It is all being reduced to zeroes and ones – â€Å"bits.† The bits are stashed on disks of home computers and in the data centers of big corporations and government agencies. The disks can hold so many bits that there is no need to pick and choose what gets remembered. So much disk storage is being produced every year that it could be used to record a page of information, every minute or two, about you and every other human being on earth. Once something is on a computer, it can replicate and move around the world in a heartbeat. Making a million perfect copies takes but an instant – copy of things we want everyone in the world to see, and also copies of things that weren’t meant to be copied at all. Due to instantaneous transfers, some data leak. Credit card records are supposed to stay locked up in a data warehouse, but escape into the hands of identity thieves. And we sometimes give information away just because we get something back for doing so. A company will give you free phone calls to anywhere in the world—if you don’t mind watching ads for the products its computers hear you talking about. The book presents 7 ‘koans’ or principles regarding the bits and the effect of it on humanity. Koan 1: Even though your computer seems to present pictures, texts, songs, and videos, they are all composed of bits. Everything that’s digital are ruled by bits. Even as we speak, bits are flying through the airwaves by our phones. Koan 2: Every copy made by a computer is perfect. The era of books  being handwritten oftentimes resulting to mistakes, has now been closed by digital explosion. And even though these machines do fail as long as the bits have been communicated, the probability of error of the bits is so slim. Koan 3: Vast as world-wide data storage is today, five years from now it will be ten times as large. Yet the information explosion means, paradoxically, the loss of information that is not online. Outdated software and information not stored in the computer are usually assumed as inexistent. Koan 4: The speed of a computer is usually measured by the number of basic operations, such as additions, that can be performed in one second. The fastest computers available in the early 1940s could perform about five operations per second. The fastest today can perform about a trillion. Koan 5: Exponential growth is actually smooth and steady; it just takes very little time to pass from unnoticeable change to highly visible. In the rapidly changing world of bits, it pays to notice even small changes, and to do something about them. Koan 6: Data stored will all be kept forever, unless there are policies to get rid of it. The Internet consists of millions of interconnected computers; once data gets out, there is no getting it back. Victims of identity theft experience daily the distress of having to remove misinformation from the record. It seems never to go away. Koan 7: In the bits world, in which messages flow instantaneously, it sometimes seems that distance doesn’t matter at all. The instantaneous communication of massive amounts of information has created the misimpression that there is a place called â€Å"Cyberspace,† a land without frontiers where all the world’s people can be interconnected as though they were residents of the same small town. The book introduces two basic morals. The first is that information technology is inherently neither good nor bad—it can be used for good or ill, to free us or to shackle us. Second, new technology brings social change, and change comes with both risks and opportunities. Any technology can be used for good or ill. Nuclear reactions create electric power and weapons of mass destruction. The same encryption technology that makes it possible for you to email your friends with confidence that no eavesdropper will be able to decipher your message also makes it possible for terrorists to plan their attacks undiscovered. The key to managing the ethical and moral consequences of technology while nourishing economic growth is to regulate the use of technology without  banning or restricting its creation.

Gravimetric Analysis Definition

Gravimetric analysis is a collection of  quantitative analysis laboratory techniques  based on the measurement of an analytes mass. One example of a  gravimetric analysis technique  can be used to determine the amount of an ion in a solution by dissolving a known amount of a compound containing the ion in a solvent to separate the ion from its compound. The ion is then precipitated or evaporated out of solution and weighed. This form of gravimetric analysis is called precipitation gravimetry. Another form of gravimetric analysis is volatization gravimetry. In this technique, compounds in a mixture are separated by heating them to chemically decompose the specimen. Volatile compounds are vaporized and lost (or collected), leading to a measurable reduction on the mass of the solid or liquid sample. Precipitation Gravimetric Analysis Example In order for gravimetric analysis to be useful, certain conditions must be met: The ion of interest must fully precipitate from solution.The precipitate must be a pure compound.It must be possible to filter the precipitate. Of course, there is error in such an analysis! Perhaps not all of the ion will precipitate. They may be impurities collected during filtration. Some sample may be lost during the filtration process, either because it passes through the filter or else is not recovered from the filtration medium. As an example, silver, lead, or mercury may be used to determine chlorine because these metals for insoluble chloride. Sodium, on the other hand, forms a chloride that dissolves in water rather than precipitates. Steps of Gravimetric Analysis Careful measurements are necessary for this type of analysis. Its important to drive away any water that may be attracted to a compound. Place an unknown in a weigh bottle that has its lid cracked open. Dry the bottle and sample in an oven to remove water. Cool the sample in a desiccator.Indirectly weigh a mass of the unknown in a beaker.Dissolve the unknown to produce a solution.Add a precipitating agent to the solution. You may wish to heat the solution, as this increases the particle size of the precipitate, reducing loss during filtration. Heating the solution is called digestion.Use vacuum filtration to filter the solution.Dry and weigh the collected precipitate.Use stoichiometry based on the balanced chemical equation to find the mass of the ion of interest. Determine the mass percent of the analyte by dividing the mass of analyte by mass of unknown. For example, using silver to find an unknown chloride, a calculation might be: Mass of dry unknown chloride: 0.0984Mass of AgCl precipitate: 0.2290 Since one mole of AgCl contains one mole of Cl- ions: (0.2290 g AgCl)/(143.323 g/mol) 1.598 x 10-3 mol AgCl(1.598 x 10-3)x(35.453 g/mol Cl) 0.0566 g Cl (0.566 g Cl)/(0.0984 g sample) x 100% 57.57% Cl in unknown sample Note lead would have been another option for the analysis. However, if lead had been used, the calculation would have needed to account for the fact one mole of PbCl2 contains two moles of chloride. Also note, error would have been greater using lead because lead is not completely insoluble. A small quantity of chloride would have remained in solution instead of precipitating.