CULTURAL COMPETENCE INTEGRATION IN THE NURSING CURRICULUM

With an increasingly diverse population, it is important to ensure that graduates of nursing programs are able to deliver culturally competent care (Krainovich-Miller et al., 2008; Allen, 2010). This study was undertaken to address this call to include cultural competence integration into nursing curriculum. The purpose of this study was to discover evidence of cultural competence integration in the nursing curriculum as perceived by faculty and students in a baccalaureate nursing program. This study addressed the following research questions: a) Does the undergraduate nursing curriculum integrate cultural competence?, b) Do the undergraduate nursing faculty perceive cultural competence content in the nursing courses?, and c) Do the undergraduate nursing students perceive cultural competence content in the nursing courses? The design for this research was a non-experiment post-test only study using descriptive and correlation methods. The instrument used was the Blueprint for Integration of Cultural Competence in the Curriculum Questionnaire (BICCCQ), a 31- item questionnaire involving five factors (α= .96). Analysis of means and standard deviations of the nursing faculty and students responses on the BICCCQ revealed that there is a perception of cultural competency content in the nursing curriculum and courses. Almost 84% of the questions had a mean score of over 1 which would indicate medium or high level of inclusion in the curriculum while only 16% mean scored less than one which would indicate a low level of inclusion in the curriculum. The results of the study suggest that there is an integration of cultural competence in the nursing curriculum in the baccalaureate nursing program