Weaving a transcultural thread.

Area of Science:

• Nursing Education
• Transcultural Nursing
• Cultural Competence

Background:

• Healthcare demands culturally competent professionals.
• Undergraduate nursing programs require effective strategies to teach transcultural nursing.
• Existing curricula may lack comprehensive integration of diversity and cultural sensitivity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe the development and implementation of an educational strategy for transcultural nursing.
• To integrate diversity and transcultural nursing concepts throughout an undergraduate nursing curriculum.
• To assess student awareness of culturally congruent care.

Main Methods:

• Developed a six-quarter seminar course series titled "Nurse and Society."
• Integrated cultural diversity, ethics, professionalism, and policy as core curriculum threads.
• Utilized faculty evaluations for formative feedback on course content.

Main Results:

• Most graduating students demonstrated awareness of the need for culturally congruent patient care.
• Faculty evaluations indicated successful integration of transcultural concepts.
• The strategy enhanced student knowledge regarding diversity and transcultural nursing.

Conclusions:

• The implemented educational strategy successfully raised student awareness of culturally congruent care.
• There is a need for robust programmatic evaluation to measure empirical outcomes of cultural competence.
• Further research should focus on developing and validating tools to assess cultural competence in nursing graduates.