NURS FPX 6025 Assessment 5 Practicum and Social Justice
My thesis topic focuses on my practicum experience in nursing informatics at a cancer center. I will be reviewing the issues of ethics, social justice, multicultural care, and leadership in which I had an experience of accomplishment and difficulty. Another element I intend to examine will be the appreciation for multicultural care in its practical application and the duty of nurses to uphold the provision of culturally competent care. I will also summarize my reflections and describe how these experiences made me produce the professional nurse informaticist I wanted to be.
Importance of Learning About Multicultural Care
Acquiring the fundamentals of multicultural care stands out as the most significant issue on the agenda of any healthcare setting for an inclusive cancer center, as it helps eliminate health disparities and improve patient outcomes. Besides, they play a role in providing culturally competent care in nursing, which means acknowledging, respecting, and valuing patients’ cultural differences and diversity (Nair & Adetayo, 2019). Cultural effectiveness is the starting point in providing quality care for diverse patients with differing backgrounds. As Swihart and Martin noted (2022), other societies have peculiar thoughts about the causes of cancer, thereby impacting the acceptance of medical management. In addition to getting an insight into these cultural differences and realizing the patients’ beliefs, values, and traditions of patients from different communities, nurses can make their services more patient-oriented and culturally responsive.
The relationship between multicultural nursing care and language barriers is also applicable, which helps nurses transmit information, build trust with patients from different cultures, and improve their skills. This is one of the critical aspects of cancer care. Patients need information about their diagnosis, the possible treatments available, and the probable side effects of the drugs they will be taking to make the right decisions about their treatment. Becoming lost in meaning can be a very stressful feeling for the patients. It may cause anxiety for them, and they are less likely to stick to their treatment plans, hoping for better results. Then by means of advocating for multicultural care, we can take care of the health inequalities which is due to cultural and ethnic variations. Culturally competent care delivery can improve healthcare access and decrease health inequalities caused by healthcare that is of a higher degree of disadvantage to a group of people (Kaihlanen et al., 2019).
Ethical Obligation of Nurses
In healthcare institutions, the position nurses take to provide culturally competent care is ethically envisioned. This implies that they must be educated on and show respect for their patients’ diverse cultures, beliefs, and practices, ensuring that their services are appropriate. They must, therefore, get this from Haddad and Geiger (2022). As a nurse informaticist in the cancer hospital I am working in, I experienced the truth of the need to be culturally competent in delivering patient-centered services.
Culturally sensitive care is delivered in a friendly, culturally responsive way, in line with the patient’s diversity. Along with these positive cultural aspects, nurses will encounter unfamiliar and sometimes unacceptable cultural norms that will solve personal insecurity. Therefore, they need to become adopted and make an attempt to learn about unknown or uncomfortable issues. This manifests as acknowledging the patient’s tongue, faith, and culture, which is necessary for appropriate healthcare decision-making (Kaihlanen et al., 2019).
I watched closely how nurses relate and attend to patients of different cultural backgrounds in my practicum hours. The oncology unit I was employed in had a well-mixed patient community. The nurses always paid particular attention to the cultural aspects of their guidance to the patients. They took time to study a patient’s disorder, having understood the impact of culture on the provision of care. Besides, they also worked for individuals with captious English skills, and in addition to explaining such things as care plans and instructions, they elaborated on them.
Nurses and their obligation to cultural competence should also have an ethical character to ensure social justice and equity. This could include offering assistance in getting reasonable healthcare coverage without discrimination and discussing a person’s race, gender, sociological class, or any other issues. To ensure that patients receive the best possible care attainable per the American Nurses Association’s standard, nurses must take a proactive and patient-centered approach without any race or gender biases (Nursing Theory, 5th edition).
The practicum was when I realized that nurses always work on behalf of patients’ rights and fair treatment. These enlightened leaders were trying to move toward the excision of medical obstacles such as language or transportation problems. They also strived to cultivate an environment where patients were treated as human beings. Digital unicorns ensured suitable confidentiality standards and acted impartially in all dimensions of treatment rendered.
Reflection on Practicum Experience Including Accomplishments and Challenges
I faced many issues when I got engaged in this practicum experience as a nurse informaticist at the cancer center. I did tremendously for ethics, social justice, multi-cultural care, and reparatory justice. At the top of the challenges was the issue of making patients from different cultural backgrounds its priority. Balancing fair and top-quality care for all patients with pre-existing language, cultural, and belief variations on health posed significant challenges (Swihart & Martin, 2022). Nevertheless, through collaborative work with other healthcare professionals and lifelong learning, I got the multicultural competency tools to serve patients from different cultural backgrounds. In this case, the second challenge is ensuring the highest ethical standards while handling secretive medical information about patients. The security of patients` information was one of my primary roles. All-access should be granted or denied by designated people. I respected and maintained confidentiality on every patient’s data, strictly adhering to ethical principles and HIPAA Act stipulations and deploying efficient technological tools.
However, from a different perspective, I have achieved one of my primary goals during the practicum: integrating the Electronic Health Record (EHR) with improving patient care outcomes. This new infrastructure allowed for more accurate documentation and record sharing, which brought better patient care with evidence-based treatments. Moreover, the system not only facilitated fairness of and accurate patient information but also advanced quality of care (Hazazi & Wilson, 2021).
Completion of Hours
As a Cancer Center Informaticist at the Health Center, I express my performance for the practicum degree requirement. This was one of the most developed occasions as I could put the learned skills into practical use and simultaneously learn new things. While on my practicum, I actively participated by designing and assisting in implementing numerous workbook projects to improve cancer patients’ outcomes. This is where the pilot projects aimed at integrating ethics, social justice, and multiculturalism into the patient care agenda critical for delivering good quality health services.
Conclusion
During the practicum, I developed and piled up learning and application of ethical principles toward social justice and equity, as well as multicultural care for cancer patients. It was challenging but also promising and aimed at making patients better. I came to this conclusion because of the results of my studies. Sustained acquisition of knowledge and harmonized professional development are definitive aspects of nursing practice.
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References
Gerchow, L., Burka, L. R., Miner, S., & Squires, A. (2020). Language barriers between nurses and patients: A scoping review. Patient Education and Counseling, 104(3).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2020.09.017
Haddad, L. M., & Geiger, R. A. (2022). Nursing ethical considerations. National Library of Medicine.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK526054/
Hazazi, A., & Wilson, A. (2021). Leveraging electronic health records to improve management of noncommunicable diseases at primary healthcare centers in Saudi Arabia: A qualitative study. BMC Family Practice, 22(1).
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12875-021-01456-2
Hosseinzadegan, F., Jasemi, M., & Habibzadeh, H. (2020). Factors affecting nurses’ impact on social justice in the health system. Nursing Ethics, 28(1).
https://doi.org/10.1177/0969733020948123
Kaihlanen, A.-M., Hietapakka, L., & Heponiemi, T. (2019). Increasing cultural awareness: Qualitative study of nurses’ perceptions about cultural competence training. BMC Nursing, 18(1), 1–9.
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-019-0363-x
Nair, L., & Adetayo, O. A. (2019). Cultural competence and ethnic diversity in healthcare. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery – Global Open, 7(5).
https://doi.org/10.1097/gox.0000000000002219
Swihart, D. L., & Martin, R. L. (2022). Cultural religious competence in clinical practice. Nih.gov; StatPearls Publishing.