Community: Medicine and Health Care

How can community health nurses apply the strategies of cultural competence to their practice? A nurse can be a part of helping a patient’s cultural preservation in their practice. For example, some people in the Jamaican culture hold nine-day wakes for deceased persons. The wake is a time for respecting and honoring the departed soul. For nine nights, relatives and friends share food and sing hymns, thus saying goodbye to the departed one (). A nurse can advocate for a patient from Jamaican cultural by coordinating with the hospice facility a way for the wake to take place as the Jamaican culture sees fit. A nurse can also apple cultural accommodation into their practice. For example, in Jamaican cultures herbal medicines are popular, and herbal medicine practitioners and balmists, who practice bush medicine, provide treatment for a wide range of ailments. A nurse can advocate for cultural accommodation by working with the health care team to accommodate the use of herbal medicine preferences. Health care team members a nurse can involve with this cultural accommodation may include the Physician, pharmacist, or nutritionist. A nurse can also also apply cultural repatterning into their practice. For example, Jamaica's most popular dish is jerk, a term that describes the process of cooking meats smothered in tongue-searing marinade, and barbecued slowly in an outdoor pit over a fire of pimento wood, which gives the meat its distinctive flavor. Unfortunately, jerk contains high levels of salt and sodium. If a patient has health issues that include congestive heart failure or hypertension, they may need to be on a low sodium diet. A nurse can help with cultural repatterning by teaching the client how to reduce the salt or sodium in their diet, but at the same time maintaining their cultural food preferences. A nurse can provide recipes for jerk with less salt, or work with a nutritionist to tweak the client’s recipes to maintain cultural flavors