WANTED PINOY NURSE FOR EXPORT: A Heritage of Care in Acculturation

“Together the nurse and the client creatively design a new or different care lifestyle for the health or well-being of the client. This mode requires the use of both generic and professional knowledge and ways to fit such diverse ideas into nursing care actions and goals. Care knowledge and skill are often repatterned for the best interest of the clients…Thus all care modalities require coparticipation of the nurse and clients (consumers) working together to identify, plan, implement, and evaluate each caring mode for culturally congruent nursing care.”

When a Filipino nurse leaves her home town, she leaves with her values of care. She enters into a realm where change can quite be an obstacle but becomes her humble making as an evolving care provider and where social change begins to question her views of her cultural origin. Her preparations were laid to become the skilled practitioner but less is emphasized in becoming a transcultural practitioner. However, she is not to be left unequipped because her heart speaks the language of human caring, in greater confidence, as she makes her way to become acculturized in her new environment. She is able to blend well because her exeperience of home makes her effective, simple in terms but is transcending. Her compassion is her great esteem that in face of a new social climate, she is capable of a meaningful representation. The video clip above makes this representation as she, in the character of Ms. Nora Aunor with her mother, anticipates this phenomenon.

Leininger’s Culture Care Theory states that caring is the essence of nursing and unique to nursing. Four nursing metaparadigm concepts were redefined: (1) the term ‘nursing’ thus cannot explain the phenomenon of nursing—care has the greatest epistemic and ontologic explanatory power to explain nursing; (2) the term ‘person’ is too limited and culture-bound to explain nursing, as the concept of ‘person’ does not exist in every culture; (3) the concept of ‘health’ is not distinct to nursing as many disciplines use the term; and (4), the concept ‘environmental context’ (instead of ‘environment’), includes events with meanings and interpretations in particular physical, ecological, sociopolitical and/or cultural settings.

A client who experiences nursing care that fails to be reasonably congruent with his/her beliefs, values, and caring lifeways will show signs of cultural conflict, noncompliance, stress and ethical or moral concern. Care always occurs in a cultural context. Culture is a framework people use to solve human problems. Therefore, the practice of transcultural nursing addresses the cultural dynamics that influence the nurse–client relationship. This entails having care measures in harmony with the client's cultural view of health.

http://nursing.jbpub.com/sitzman/CH15PDF.pdf http://herkules.oulu.fi/isbn9514264312/html/x215.html