MADELEINE LEININGER THEORY OF TRANSCULTURAL NURSING   PT2     1900w

The background to her work was derived in an essential way from, and in embedded in, anthropology and the concept of care is drawn from nursing. Leininger (1970) acknowledged the influence of anthropology on her work when she wrote, “nursing and anthropology are inified in a single specific and unitary whole” (p.2). Leininger felt that the anthropology’s most important contribution to nursing was to provide a foundation for the claim that health and illness states are primarily determined by the cultural background of the individual (Leininger, 1970, 1978) Her theory is in accord with the anthropological models that dominated in the 1960’s when Leininger first undertook fieldwork in Papua Guinea, a study which she still continues to reference some 40 years later (Leininger & McFarland, 2003).

The goal of transcultural nursing is to provide “culturally congruent, sensitive and competent nursing care” (Leininger, 1995, p.4). Culturally congruent care occurs when there is a meaningful and satisfactory match between the culture care beliefs, values and practices of the patient and the behavior of the nurse. The nurse must preserve, maintain or change nursing care behaviors with the goal of satisfying the needs of clients (Leininger, 1998, 2002) Leininger further defined such nursing action as: culture care preservation and maintenance, culture care accommodation or negotiation and culture care restructuring or re-patterning (Leininger, 1978, 1981, 1984, 1988). To become culturally competent nurses must require preparation and must undertake a course of theoretical study which gives them the ability to carry out etho-science research, culture based assessment and develop the cultural sensitivity required to design and implement culturally relevant nursing interventions (Leininger, 1978, 1981, 1984, 1988, 1995, 1998, 2002).

Social Constructionism of the theory