Marie M. Spivey
Nurses and healthcare professionals across the world have unconsciously internalized implicit biases within their services, influenced by pervasive learned behavior, attitudes, and stereotypes. These biases can easily interfere with our understanding, actions, and decisions when healthcare services are performed. Such features can also be evidenced in healthcare organizations’ recruitment, support, and retention policies, as well as the education and training elements included in academic curricula. Initial classroom preparation for nurses is based on an environment of learning related to the nursing Code of Ethics, legal requirements, care management, quality improvement, and in todays world of changing responsibilities – systems-level change management. However, opportunities to elicit perceptions of discrimination and discomfort in an unobtrusive manner from a diverse student body remains untouched. The objective of this presentation is to promote the inclusion of underlying academic policies to attract, advance and better prepare nurses by embedding building blocks of self-assessment, self-advocacy, and the identification of implicit bias into every aspect of teaching, learning, and practice for all nurses. In order to heighten the culturally congruent understanding and performance critically required for patient satisfaction, nurses must also have continuous opportunities to effectively improve communications that enhance peer-to-peer working relationships. Nurses will emerge from professional development opportunities possessing a higher level of comfort and knowledge in their ability to demonstrate more culturally congruent communication with peers, patients, other healthcare professionals and stakeholders. In so doing, they will have the ability to facilitate the achievement of health equity, strengthened relationships, and a framework for cultural competence.