Title: Transcultural self-efficacy: A must in health care: Cultural competence in nursing and public health students
Abstract:
Healthcare focuses on the valuing of others’ cultures, beliefs and practices. It also implies that the practitioner not only acknowledges the client’s culture but also knows about the culture of the client as well as utilizing the culture of the client in their care (Leininger 2006, Jeffreys, 2010). The Hawaii Pacific University’s Nursing Program was awarded a a 3 year U.S. Department of health and Human Services Administration (HRSA) Grant focused on developing culturally competent practitioners. We used Jeffrey’s Transcultural Self-Efficacy Tool (TSET) to measure perceived transcultural Self-Efficacy in our students (Burrell, 2010). Since that time, the Nursing Program has expanded to a College of Health and Society with the inclusion of Public Health and Social Work BS and MS Programs.
All of the programs in the College of Health and Society have an investment in cultural competence and culturally competent care. We have looked at the cultural competence of our many levels of nursing students as well as our social work students, pre-med students and public health students (Burrell & Bachlet, 2018). This report will focus on our senior nursing students and public health students in their utilization of transcultural skills.
We examined a small group of BSN senior students and small group of Public Health students in 2016/17. The focus was on transcultural self-efficacy of the 2 sets of students. The TSET focuses on self-efficacy perceptions in the areas of cognitive, practical and affective skills in the cultural arena. A medium score is viewed as indicative of competence, while high is somewhat over confident and low indicates more work. Our results: On the cognitive scale, 35.43% of the nursing students and 19.49% of public health students scored high; while 63.43% of the nursing students and 68.6% of the public health students perceived themselves as medium. The practical scale had 24.66% of the nursing students and 30.85% of the public health students scoring high, with 71.93% of the nursing students and 65.5% of the public health students, ranked medium. The affective scale had 64.12% of the nursing students and 39.4% of the public health students scored high, while 35.71% of the nursing students and 60.6% of the public health students scored medium. The affective scale focuses on cultural self-knowledge.
Recommendations: We’re pleased that the nursing students perceive themselves as knowing themselves in their own cultural perspectives. Nursing and Public Health are discussing the addition of a cross–cultural course to the Transcultural Nursing Certificate Program.
