Preparing Culturally Competent Practitioners

Preparing culturally competent practitioners is critical, and evaluating the effect of experiences intended to move students toward cultural competence is important. This research study explored the relationship among short-term international nursing clinical immersion experiences, cultural self-efficacy, and cultural competence. A triangulated research design was used to explore the relationship among the variables with 200 senior undergraduate and graduate nursing students from a university in New England. Quantitative analysis found statistically significant differences in the achievement of cultural self-efficacy for the participants who completed the international clinical experiences versus those who remained in the United States. Qualitative analysis, used to further explain the quantitative results, found that the differences were related to international students' ability to overcome their ethnocentrism, experience a transformative perspective about being culturally aware and sensitive, as well as understand and integrate the patients' cultural practices and beliefs into the students' Western health care practices. It became apparent that something other than cultural self-efficacy had occurred for participants in the international immersion experiences. The students believed they had entered the arena of cultural competence. Short-term clinical cultural immersion experiences have relevance for assisting faculty to move nursing students toward an understanding and achievement of cultural competence in ways currently not possible with nonimmersion community cultural experiences.