Cultural Competence and Caring Behavior Among Inpatient Staff Nurses in Al Wakra Hospital, Qatar

Abstract

Providing culturally competent and high-quality nursing care is a nurse's professional and moral responsibility and is one of the essential nursing attributes. Qatar has multicultural residents and a healthcare workforce. This highly multicultural society poses a challenge to modern healthcare to meet multicultural patient needs. However, a study correlating nurses' cultural competence and caring behavior lacks the current setting and literature that could help address this challenge.

This descriptive correlational study understands the relationship between nurses' cultural competence and caring behavior. It also examines the influence of socio- demographic characteristics on nurses' cultural competence and caring behavior.

A total of 239 nurses, recruited via stratified random sampling, participated among the adult inpatient nurses of Al Wakra Hospital in Al Wakra, Qatar. Cultural Capacity Scale (CCS) and Caring Behavior Inventory-24 (CBI-24) were used to collect the data. Data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 20.0 software.

Majority of the nurses were from the 30 to 39 age group, Filipino, Christians, had a bachelor’s degree, and 6 – 10 years of nursing experience. Female nurses outnumbered the male nurses assigned in the Medical and Surgical Inpatient and Critical Care Unit. The result indicated a significant relationship but weak correlation between nurses' cultural competence and caring behavior (rs = 0.207, p=0.001). This finding suggests the higher the level of cultural competence, the higher the nurses' quality of caring attitude. It also revealed no salient relationship between the nurses' socio-demographic characteristics and cultural competency and caring attributes (p>0.05). The healthcare facility is recommended to establish cultural competency program/s to equip the nurses further in providing culturally sensitive and high-quality care.