Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Corso di laurea in infermieristica - Sede di Modena

Abstract

With this thesis we want to provide an initial picture of what concerns intercultural assistance, paying attention to the importance of the cultural setting in the nursing profession, especially when it comes to provide assistance to foreign people. Nowadays Italy is effectively a multicultural country. In the recent decades, following the demographic explosion in developing countries and the consequent search for jobs and better life prospects in Western countries, the presence of foreigners residing in our Country has strongly increased. In this scenario, healthcare professionals are increasingly coming into contact with different ethnicities, cultures and lifestyles which make very difficult to them listening and fully understanding the needs of the others. The challenge for nursing today consists in coping with a pluralism of different cultures and backgrounds, for which an inter and transcultural approach to the assistance becomes necessary. Hence the need to approach the transcultural nursing. The purpose of this discipline, founded by the nurse and anthropologist Madeline Leininger in the early 1960s, consists precisely in understanding the person in an holistic sense, considering the culture as a broad instrument that allows us to understand the totality of life, so that the assistance can be personalized. Cultural anthropology with its sensitivity to different cultures could greatly help the nurse in the relations with users who come from distant and different cultures, to provide a competent and congruent assistance, which fully respects the cultural needs of each person and satisfying the basic needs of the individual. In this regard, cultural mediation represents a great resource and an important step in the process of cross-cultural integration and has to be seen in a perspective of mutal interchange and enrichment.