10Cultural and spiritual health assessment

Cultural health assessment Before we can explore appropriate mechanisms to assess the cultural needs of patients and clients, we need to think about why culture is important as part of the nursing process. Archer (1998: p1) suggests that culture is very difficult to describe and remains vague despite little dispute that it is a core concept. Shanahan & Bradshaw (1995: p457) would agree that: ‘the culturally diverse person’s health beliefs and practices are often not well understood and explored’. Archer Learning objectives • Define the term ‘culture’. • Discuss how cultural beliefs may influence a person’s behav-iour during an illness and describe how such behaviours may impact on the assessment process. • Identify and discuss some of the reasons why the incidence of certain medical and mental health conditions is higher in some cultural groups than in others. • Describe how the cultural needs of patients may be assessed. • Define the terms ‘spiritual ’ and ‘spirituality’. • Discuss some of the possible influences of spirituality on health and illness. • Give an outline of how the spiritual needs of a patient could be assessed. CVN10_sample 7/27/05 4:28 PM Page 311 (1998: p1) suggests that culture is ‘grasped ’ so what is this grasp that the nurse must have in the array of assessment skills they need to acquire