Madeleine Leininger
Transcultural Nursing Theory
“Transcultural nursing with a caring focus must become the dominant focus of all areas of nursing. It is the holistic and most complete and creative way to help people.”
July 13. 1925
Her basic education at St. Anthony School of Nursing, Denver, Colorado, and graduated in 1948.
She received her Bachelor of Science degree from Benedictine College, Atchison, Kansas. IN 1953, she obtained her fegree of Master of Science (Doctor of Philosophy) in Anthropology from the Universty of Washington, Seattle. A Fellow n the American Academy of Nursing, Madeleine Leininger was conferred as an LhD (Doctor of Humane Letters, honorable given) from Benedictine College.
She is considered by some to be the "Margaret Mead of nursing" and is recognized worldwide as the founder of transcultural nursing, a program that she created at the School in 1974. She has written or edited 27 books and founded the Journal of Transcultural Nursing to support the research of the Transcultural Nursing Society, which she started in 1974.
Person
- Human beings are explained very well in her assumptions.
Health
- Health is a key concept in transcultural nursing. Because of the weight on the need for nurses to have knowledge that is specific to the culture in which nursing is being practiced, it is acknowledged that health is seen as being universal across cultures but distinct within each culture in a way that represents the beliefs, values, and practices of the particular culture. Thus health is both universal and diverse.
Environment
- included events with meanings and interpretations given to them in particular physical, ecological, sociopolitical or cultural setting. Existing forces outside the organism and in the context of culture.
Nursing
Madeleine Leininger showed her concern to nurses who do not have sufficient preparation for a transcultural perspective. For that reason, they will not be able to value nor practice such viewpoint to the fullest extent possible.
Madeleine Leininger gave three types of nursing actions that are culturally-based and thus consistent with the needs and values of the clients. These are:
- Cultural care preservation/maintenance
- Cultural care accommodation/negotiation
- Cultural care repatterning/restructuring
Leininger's theoretical assumptions and orientational definitions:
1. Care is the essence of nursing and a distinct, dominant, and unifying focus.
2. Care (caring) is essential for well being, health, healing, growth survival, and to face handicaps or death.
3. Culture care is the broadest holistic means to know, explain, interpret, and predict nursing care phenomena to guide nursing care practices.
4. Nursing is a transcultural, humanistic, and scientific care discipline and profession with the central purpose to serve human beings worldwide.
5. Care (caring) is essential to curing and healing, for there can be no curing without caring.
6. Culture care concepts, meanings, expressions, patterns, processes, and structural forms of care are different (diversity) and similar (towards commonalities or universalities) among all cultures of the world.
7. Every human culture has lay (generic, folk, or indigenous) care knowledge and practices and usually some professional care knowledge and practices which vary transculturally.
8. Cultural care values, beliefs, and practices are influenced by and tend to be embedded in worldview, language, religious (or spiritual), kinship (social), political (or legal), educational, economic, technological, ethnohistorical, and environmental context of a particular culture.
9. Beneficial, healthy, and satisfying culturally based nursing care contributes to the well being of individuals, families, groups, and communities within their environmental context.
10. Culturally congruent or beneficial nursing care can only occur when the individual, group, community, or culture care values, expressions, or patterns are known and used appropriately and in meaningful ways by the nurse with the people.
11. Culture care differences and similarities between professional caregiver(s) and client (generic) care-receiver(s) exist in any human culture worldwide.
12. Clients who experience nursing care that fails to be reasonably congruent with their beliefs, values, and caring lifeways will show signs of cultural conflicts, noncompliance, stresses and ethical or moral concerns.
13. The qualitative paradigm provides new ways of knowing and different ways to discover the epistemic and ontological dimensions of human care transculturally. (Leininger, M. M. (1991). The theory of culture care diversity and universality. New York: National League for Nursing., pp.44-45)
"Leininger defined nursing as a learned scientific and humanistic profession and discipline focused on human care phenomena and caring activities in order to assist, support, facilitate or enable individuals or groups to maintain or regain their health or well-being in culturally meaningful and beneficial ways, or to help individuals face handicaps or death." (Leininger, M. M., & McFarland, M. R. (2002). Transcultural nursing:Concepts, theories, research & practice. New York: McGraw Hill., p. 46)
Leininger provides a visual aid to her theory with the Sunrise Model.
Theoretical Assertion
- The discipline of nursing has slowly evolved from the traditional role of women having been influenced by a variety of factors such as apprenticeship, humanitarian aims, religious ideals, medicine, increasing technology, politics, war, feminism and more recently research. This variety of influences is reflected in the many and varied definitions and descriptions of nursing currently espoused in the literature. A review of the most widely cited definitions and descriptions of nursing from Nightingale to the present day resulted in the identification of eight theoretical perspectives of nursing. Each of these are discussed. The author concludes that nursing has yet to arrive at a consensus regarding the nature, components and process of nursing which is crucial for professional credibility and the viability of professional nursing as it enters the next millennium.
Created by: Martizano Marephine C.
- Humans are believed to be caring and capable of being concerned about the desires, welfare, and continued existence of others. Human care is collective, that is, seen in all cultures.
- Humans are universally caring beings who survive in a diversity of cultures through their ability to provide universality of care in a variety of ways according to differing cultures, needs and settings.
