CARE ENVIRONMENTS

Care Environments

Care Environments

Introduction

Communication with culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) patients has been shown to be difficult. This study describes nurses' experiences of communicating with CLD patients in an acute care setting. Main findings were: interpreters, bilingual health workers and combinations of different strategies were used to communicate with CLD patients; some nurses showed empathy, respect and a willingness to make an effort in the communication process with others showing an ethno-centric orientation.

Main recommendations were: prioritizing access to appropriate linguistic services, providing nurses with support from health care workers, e.g., bilingual health care workers who are able to provide more in-depth information, increasing nurses' understanding of legal issues within patient encounters, supporting nurses to translate their awareness of cultural diversity into acceptance of, appreciation for and commitment to CLD patients and their families. (Zoucha , Husted , 2000, 325)

Factors

Social Factor

Care needs to be taken that we consider older people from a gerontological perspective that considers how we can facilitate older people to self manage, that takes account of a persons life history and coping mechanisms and focuses on what a person can do rather than what they can't irrespective of their age. There is a danger that inadvertently we continue to perpetuate a traditional biomedical model of old age that views older people from a negative stance of illness and bodily decline and focuses on deficits rather than strength and ability. (Skills for Health , 2007)

The demographic changes in the UK mean that politically the 'grey vote' will be very difficult for successive governments to ignore and could potentially change the landscape for older people to become a very powerful group in which to lobby successive governments on issues in relation to health and social care that perhaps in the past have been largely ignored. Universities ignore this at their peril.

The 'Modernising Nursing Careers' document and guidance added 'care of the old and geriatrics' alongside home nursing to the guidelines for ensuring that knowledge, learning and experience required by the EU directives for general care were met in full. The irony of the EU directives is that whilst the NMC state that nurses wishing to practice in the UK has to demonstrate that they have achieved the required level of competency in the care of the old and geriatrics and home nursing, these principles are not truly embedded into the pre registration curricula in schools of nursing across England. It could also be argued that the terminology used by the NMC is in itself promoting an ageist view of the care of older people. (Royal College of Nursing , 2007)

Older people are not a homogenous group of people. According to the Kings Fund (2003), examples of ageism include stereotypical assumptions that older people are a homogenous group; failing to appreciate individuality and diversity. The NSFOP acknowledged in standard 1 'rooting out age discrimination' that both explicit and implicit ageism exists in health and social care. The Kings Fund (2003) suggests that strategies to address implicit ageism should include raising ...