The Multicultural Nurse is embroiled in literature reviews right now, and I’ve stumbled across a few great articles that are available to the public. Unfortunately, many journal articles are only available to folks who work or study in an academic center, unless you subscribe to that journal or pay a per-use fee. Although there’s some great stuff being published in the journals, I’m not including any of it today because of those fees.
First, an excellent piece by Dr. Marianne Jeffries, Dynamics of Diversity. Dr. Jeffries makes the case for building cultural competence into our interactions with patients and with each other. I think most nurses are really good at patient-centered interventions, but I think we struggle when it comes to caring for each other. That’s something that needs to be addressed for the the health of the profession and of the individuals who make up the profession: us.
Second, here’s a piece by Debra Wood, Diversity in Nursing: Will It Ever Match Patient Demographics? This piece discusses some of the projects out there intended to increase nursing diversity, and makes the point that we need a more diverse nursing faculty.
Finally, here is a piece by Dr. Janice Phillips & Dr. Beverly Malone: Increasing Racial/Ethnic Diversity in Nursing to Reduce Health Disparities and Achieve Health Equity. This report is a downloadable pdf and covers characteristics of successful minority recruitment and retention strategies. The takeaway for me from this article is that there’s a lot of great stuff happening in the nursing world. If you want to do something about diversity in your organization you won’t necessarily need to invent the wheel – there are folks out there willing to share their strategies and insights.
TMCN
The Multicultural Nurse 