Theory of Culture Care: Diversity and Universality

A nurse walks into a patient’s room, quickly noticing that the room has been completely rearranged from the typical layout. The oxygen outlet is on the opposite side of the room, the call light barely reaches the patient; the nurse begins to feel very uncomfortable due to the differences in the unusual room set-up. Unaware of why these changes occurred, the nurse begins to move things back into their respective places, without asking the patient for the reasoning behind the changes.
As the shift changes over, the oncoming nurse goes into the patient’s room and notices that the patient seems very uncomfortable, and there is quite a change in the patient’s affect. Curious as to why the patient seems upset and mistreated, the nurse begins to question the patient. After spending time listening to the patient, the nurse learns that the patient practices Islam and is required to face the direction of Mecca while in bed due to the patient’s inability to move to the floor during the daily prayers. Understanding that this is a religious practice within the Islamic religion, the nurse assists the patient in rearranging the room once again.
This may not be the original experience that Madeleine Leininger, a diploma nurse, experienced when she began realizing there was a missing characteristic in the care that a nurse provided, yet many similar misunderstandings happen day to day in the practice of patient care (Sitzman & Eichelberger, 2011).
Madeleine Leininger worked as a nurse in a child guidance home, and began to notice that reoccurring behavioral patterns of the children seemed to have a correlation to their cultural identity. Leininger began to see that there was a lack of cultural knowledge and cultural sensitivity being imp...

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...mum non nocere (First, Do No Harm): Prayer, Culture, and Evidence-Based Practice. Retrieved May 26, 2014, from http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/561760_3
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Sitzman, K., & Eichelberger, L. W. (2011). Madeleine Leininger's Culture Care: Diversity and Universality Theory. Understanding the work of nurse theorists a creative beginning (2nd ed.,). Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.