Culture, Diversity, and Relational Practice

Providing culturally responsive care requires adopting concepts of relational practice, which involves providing the best care for diverse populations while practicing self-awareness and recognizing differences without bias. As a community health nurse, or CHN, you’ll provide safe, competent, and ethical care.

Okay, so there are some important concepts to keep in mind when providing care for your patients. Culture refers to behaviors and beliefs learned and shared within a group of people.

Now, people aren’t born with culture, instead it’s learned from experiences, so it can adapt over time with new situations and contexts.

Culture can be invisible in that it’s experienced through shared rituals and behaviors that can impact how people respond to situations and make decisions.

In a cultural context, diversity looks at how traits (such as age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, and income level) shape similarities, differences, and power dynamics among people.

Diversity can be visible or invisible. Visible diversity includes observable characteristics like age, physical appearance, race, and gender; ...

... whereas invisible diversity involves traits that aren't immediately obvious, such as religion, occupation, and sexual orientation.

While those who are visibly diverse are at increased risk of experiencing stereotyping or discrimination, those with invisible diversity might feel overlooked.

Race is a social classification where an imagined hierarchy of value is based on physical characteristics like skin color. On the other hand, ethnicity involves belonging to a social group that has certain cultural patterns in common, like beliefs, values, and customs, and is influenced by factors like geographic location, heritage, education, and income level.

Keep in mind that people of the same race can have different ethnicities and cultures.

For instance, Black individuals are often wrongly viewed as sharing the same ethnicity and culture, even though they’re a diverse group with ancestry and heritage that can be traced back to North America, Africa, the Caribbean, or elsewhere.

Now, relational practice can be further developed by integrating cultural safety and cultural humility into practice.

Cultural safety considers how historical contexts have led to the development of dominant healthcare delivery systems which have disempowered marginalized groups.

It aims to identify power imbalances between providers and patients to foster equity, reduce discrimination, and promote inclusive and respectful care for those of all cultural identities.

Don’t forget that cultural safety is defined by the patient during nurse-patient interactions, meaning that it’s only present when the patient feels respected, safe, and free from prejudice and discrimination.