The Transcultural Nursing Theory or Culture Care Theory by Madeleine Leininger involves knowing and understanding different cultures concerning nursing and health-illness caring practices, beliefs, and values to provide meaningful and efficacious nursing care services to people’s cultural values health-illness context. The goal of Transcultural Nursing is to develop a scientific and humanistic body of knowledge in order to provide culture-specific and culture-universal nursing care practices. Leininger’s Transcultural Nursing Theory
It focuses on the fact that different cultures have different caring behaviors and different health and illness values, beliefs, and patterns of behaviors.
The cultural care worldview flows into knowledge about individuals, families, groups, communities, and institutions in diverse health care systems. This knowledge provides culturally specific meanings and expressions about care and health. The next focus is on the generic or folk system, professional care system(s), and nursing care. Information about these systems includes the characteristics and the specific care features of each. This information allows for the identification of similarities and differences or cultural care universality and cultural care diversity.
Next are nursing care decisions and actions which involve cultural care preservation/maintenance, cultural care accommodation/negotiation, and cultural care re-patterning or restructuring. It is here that nursing care is delivered.
In 1995, Madeleine Leininger defined transcultural nursing as “a substantive area of study and practiced focused on comparative cultural care (caring) values, beliefs, and practices of individuals or groups of similar or different cultures to provide culture-specific and universal nursing care practices in promoting health or well-being or to help people to face unfavorable human conditions, illness, or death in culturally meaningful ways.”
The Transcultural Nursing Theory first appeared in Leininger’s Culture Care Diversity and Universality, published in 1991, but it was developed in the 1950s. The theory was further developed in her book Transcultural Nursing, which was published in 1995. In the third edition of Transcultural Nursing, published in 2002, the theory-based research and the Transcultural theory application are explained.
Harvard style