Nurse-educators' perception of cultural congruent nursing care: a model for education of novice nurses

The population of South Africa is multicultural and because of this multiculturalism, health care practitioners render care to health care consumers of different cultural backgrounds. For practitioners to render holistic care that satisfies the consumers, nurses must have been comprehensively educated to render culturally congruent nursing care to all health care consumers. For nurseeducators to be able to impart the science and art of culturally congruent, holistic nursing care to novice nurses, the nurse-educators must themselves have been educated on culturally congruent and holistic nursing care. The purpose of the study was to ascertain how nurse-educators at universities and nursing colleges perceive culturally congruent nursinq.care, as well as the implications this has on the education of novice nurse practitioners. A nonexperimental research design of a descriptive, explorative, phenomenological and contextual nature was used to achieve the goal of the study. The point of departure for collecting the data was the "Reflective inquiry methodology" using focus group interviews, a questionnaire and a checklist to collect the necessary data. The focus group interviews were used to ground the formulation of questions included in the questionnaire while the checklist was used to audit the generic nursing education programmes on the educational grounding of culturally congruent, holistic nursing care. Based on the results obtained, it became clear that nurse-educators are not well prepared to teach holistic, culturally congruent nursing care. Furthermore, the majority of respondents recommend that culturally congruent nursing care be included in the curriculum of generic nursing education programmes. Based on the recommendations that were made, a model for the education of both the educators and the novice nurse practitioners was developed and adopted, taking the Brokering Model as described by Chalanda as a point of departure. The model ensured that both nurse-educators and practitioners possess the right mindset and have a comprehensive view of the science and art of nursing care, enabling them to teach and to render value-led, comprehensive and culturally congruent, holistic health care to all health care consumers.