Cultural competence in the undergraduate nursing curriculum

More demands are being put on nursing faculty to incorporate content related to cultural competence in the undergraduate curriculum. Adding more content into an already full curriculum and becoming proficient at teaching cultural competence throughout the curriculum are challenging to nursing faculty. In addition, identifying personal bias to ensure that students are prepared to deliver culturally sensitive care requires a certain amount of self-awareness of personal prejudice. The purpose of this article is to present the implementation of the newly developed Blueprint for Integration of Cultural Competence in the Curriculum (BICCC) into an undergraduate nursing curriculum as a framework for teaching cultural competence in an undergraduate nursing curriculum. This will include defining culture and cultural competence as they relate to teaching, presenting educational standards of cultural competence in accrediting agencies, presenting level objectives for learning cultural competent information, describing a curriculum incorporating cultural competence in an undergraduate nursing program, and providing examples of implementation of cultural competence teaching strategies for nursing faculty.