Biography:
Abstract:
Individuals' health behaviors and health perceptions are regarded inseperable from each other. Communities having endeavored to maintain their cultural characteristics for centuries have passed down this on their health behaviors and strived for finding cures to their health problems in their cultural lives. The individuals’ beliefs about health, attitudes and behaviors, past experiences, treatment practices, in short their culture, play a vital role in improving health, preventing and treating diseases. Culture is influential at many levels in health, ranging from the formation of new diagnostic groups, to the diagnosis of disease to the determination of what is called a disease or not symptoms and disease cues. However, in almost all regions of the world, wars, ethnic conflicts, repressive regimes, environmental and economic crises along with globalization have forced many people to abandon their country and migrate in their country or to immigrate other countries as refugees. As a result, multicultural populations comprised of individuals, families and groups from different cultures and subcultures are rapidly emerging all around the world. In order to improve the health behaviors of the community, cultural factors affecting health behavior and health care services need to be clearly recognised. Unless health care initiatives are based on cultural values, it will be impossible to achieve the goal and the care provided will be incomplete and fail. Cultural differences and health beliefs have been recognized for many years as prior knowledge in practice. Despite that, cultural health care is unfortunately not part of a routine or common health practice. Knowing cultural beliefs related to health can enable us to build a framework for data collection in health care. In order for the societies to regulate health care that will meet the needs of different groups in terms of culture, all health team members must be equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills. The nursing profession, which plays an important role in the health team, is a cultural phenomenon. The patient's cultural values, beliefs and practices are an integral part of holistic nursing care. Transcultural nursing provides effective nursing care to meet the cultural needs of individuals, families and groups. The concept of "Transcultural Nursing" derived from the need to care for individuals in different cultures in nursing was first used by Madeleine Leininger in 1979. Transcultural nursing is sensitive to the needs of families, groups and individuals who are representatives of groups with different cultures in a community or socieity. This sensitive approach provides support for the individual in achieving the well-being and happiness. The aims of transcultural nursing are to provide sensitive and effective nursing care to meet the cultural needs of individuals, families and groups, to integrate transcultural concepts, theories and practices into nursing education, research and clinical applications, to improve transcultural nursing knowledge, and to incorporate this knowledge into nursing practice. The International Nurses Association (ICN) invited the nurses from the World Health Organization (WHO) member countries to work on adaptable models to their communities at the 1989 Seoul Conference. Some of these models include ;
- Leininger’s Sunrise Model
- Narayanasamy’s ACCESS Model:
- Giger and Davidhizars’s Transcultural Assessment Model
- Purnell’s Model For Cultural Competence