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ABSTRACT
Despite efforts by the nursing profession to enhance culture competence among nurses, some limitations in understanding the potential lack of culture competence in the patient remain. Nurses are often not aware of their own cultural bias from the patient's perspective (ethnocentricity) and fail to understand that many patients are trying to function in unfamiliar social and medical cultures simultaneously. This article reviews the experiences of student nurses from Malta and the Midwestern United States who were given the opportunity to explore their cultural biases by visiting the healthcare institutions of their respective countries.
Globalization of health care creates the potential for cultural differences to affect patient care. Because nurses comprise the largest number of healthcare workers throughout the world, any opportunity for cultural exchange in nursing is an opportunity to better understand the cultural needs of patients wherever they are cared for. Student nurses and faculty possess a unique opportunity to host or visit their global counterparts during the formative years of nursing education. This article reviews the experiences of student nurses from Malta and the Midwestern United States who were given the opportunity to explore their cultural biases by visiting the healthcare institutions of their respective countries.
UNDERSTANDING ETHNOCENTRICITY
Cultural competence in Western nursing is generally associated with nurses who competently care for patients from cultures other than their own. Twenty years ago, Burrows (1983) stated that transcultural nursing should be regarded as an essential element in the nursing curriculum and that failure to include it may be considered a form of institutionalized racism in which one section of the population is cast as the "norm" from which others differ. However, Farrington (1991) asserted that no matter how culturally competent therapists may be, their patient's experience remains structured in terms of the therapist's culture. Thus, by implication, care is interpreted within the cultural mind set of the therapist or nurse. Such a mind set is probably not obvious to the nurse and essentially amounts to ethnocentricity, namely a world view that is limited to the experience of the nurse's own culture. Ethnocentricity, also referred to as ethnocentrism, originates from the Greek language and means culture centered. Webster's Dictionary (1973) refers to ethnocentricity as an attitude of cultural superiority. However, in the context...