Madeleine Leininger Transcultural Theory in Nursing

Care is the essence of nursing and a distinct, dominant, central and unifying focus.

Founder and Leader Transcultural Nursing and Human Care theory.

1948 Basic Nursing education at St. Anthonys School of Nursing in Denver, Colorado. 1950 Merited Bachelor of Science degree from Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas 1954 Obtained masters degree in Psychiatric Nursing from Catholic University Began the First Masters level clinical specialist program in child psychiatric nursing in the world. The first professional nurse to hold PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology.

1960s First use of the terms Transcultural nursing, ehtnonursing, and cross-cultural nursing.

1966 University of Colorado offered the first Transcultural nursing course. Central theme: Caring is the central theme of nursing care, nursing knowledge, and nursing practice. Transcultural Nursing A major area of nursing that focuses on the comparative study and analysis of diverse cultures and subcultures in the world with respect to their caring values, expressions, and health-illness beliefs and patterns of behavior.

Purpose To discover human care diversities and universalities in relation to worldview, social structure, and other dimensions cited. To discover ways to provide culturally congruent care to people of different or similar cultures. Practice Prepares nurses to prevent culture shock and conflicts as they practice in various culture. Provides human care and health behaviors as background knowledge. Helps produce a well-qualified nurse-educators prepared in Transcultural nursing. Leads to culturally competent nursing care. Ethnonursing research method to examine theory.

Education Research

Goal To improve and to provide culturally congruent care to people. Culture Care Assessment Sunrise Model Depicts the Inter-relationships of Culture Care Diversity and Universality Theory Factors needed to be included for culturally competent care. culture care meanings practices factors influencing care - Religion, politics, economics, worldview, environment, cultural values, history, language, gender, and others.

Central Purpose:

To discover and explain diverse and universal culturally based care factors influencing the health, well-being, illness, or death of individuals or groups.

Purpose & Goal: To use research findings to provide culturally congruent, safe, and meaningful care to clients of diverse or similar cultures. Nursing Actions Culture care preservation or maintenance refers to those assistive, supportive, facilitative, or enabling professional actions and decisions that help people of a particular culture to retain or maintain meaningful care values and lifeways for their well-being, to recover from illness, or to deal with handicaps or dying. Culture care accommodation or negotiation refers to those assistive, supportive, facilitative, or enabling professional actions and decisions that help people of designated culture to adapt to or negotiate with others for meaningful, beneficial, and congruent health outcomes. Culture care repatterning or restructuring refers to the assistive, supportive facilitative, or enabling professional actions, or modify their lifeways for new, different, and beneficial health outcomes. Leiningers Theory is flexible and widely useful.
Care is the heart of nursing; Care is power; Care is essential to healing; Care is curing; and Care is the central and dominant focus of nursing and Transcultural nursing decisions and action.