NURSING STUDENTS’ CULTURAL AWARENESS AND HIGH-FIDELITY SIMULATION SKILLS

Abstract

Cultural awareness is learning to be self-aware of other cultures and even an individual’s own culture. Nursing students learn about influences of values and beliefs, and the impacts of culture as they consider how to care for patients of other cultures. However, as students are learning cultural awareness for patient care they may struggle with some of their own cultural values and beliefs that may affect them in ways that they are not aware. This descriptive correlational study involved two research questions that examined undergraduate nursing students’ (n = 51) cultural awareness, and the association between undergraduate nursing students’ cultural awareness and students’ nursing skills in the capstone skills refresher test that include cultural aspects of care. The National League for Nursing (NLN) Jeffries Simulation Theory (2016) guided the relational proposition tested in this study. The Cultural Awareness Scale (Rew et al., 2014) was used to measure undergraduate nursing students’ cultural awareness. The Point-Biserial (r pbis) correlation revealed a non-significant correlation (r = .305, p = 0.1) between undergraduate nursing students’ cultural awareness and students’ nursing skills in the capstone skills refresher test. The Chi square(x2) test indicated that students’ cultural experience in the current nursing program was the only variable that was significantly associated (p = .005) with nursing students’ skills. Nursing faculty must create learning environments that help nursing students to become more culturally aware of themselves and others.