APPLICATION ASSIGNMENT

Application Assignment



Application Assignment

Introduction

Educators, businessmen and politicians worry about cultural conflict -- it fouls up their agendas: it interferes with schooling, commerce and government. The primary cause of cultural conflict they have fallen into the bad habit of characterizing as “bias and discrimination.” They have taken two good words and transformed them into muddled slogans.

Example 1

Brimming with enthusiasm her first day on the job, the young African-American nurse walks into her very first patient's room and introduces herself. The patient responds, “You can just get your black a** out of my room.” Although this painful incident happened to Valda Boyd Ford, MPH, MS, RN, many years ago, new minority nursing graduates tell her that the same thing still happens to them today.

How should minority nurses handle patients who make racist remarks, or even refuse to be cared for by a nurse of color? Is it better to turn the other cheek or to stand up for yourself? Many minority nursing leaders who have “been there” suggest trying to ascertain the patient's intent in making the remark. Did the patient make a direct and obvious derogatory comment? Or did he or she seem frustrated or confused and blurt out a culturally insensitive remark unaware of a more appropriate thing to say? (Ford & Joseph 2006)

“You have to try to put yourself in the place of the patient,” says Ruth Brinkley, CHE, RN, an African-American nurse executive who is president and CEO of Memorial Health Care System in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “If you were under duress and very ill, who knows what you might say? We all have our own biases.”

Ford, who is director of community and multicultural affairs at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, agrees. “You have to balance the comment with the fact that patients are in their most vulnerable state. Sometimes we as nurses have to put our feelings aside to consider what's best for the patients,” she says, recalling her years as a nurse in a burn unit. “Nothing I could do for the patients was any good because in their mind they didn't want to be there.” (Gregory 2004)

Organizations can do this by conducting focus groups with the individuals who do the hiring and by conducting follow-up interviews with candidates who didn't get the promotion to ask them why they think they didn't succeed. Sometimes this step requires bringing in consultants who understand how to ...