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Educare

Educare

MARZO 2004 N° 3 Volumen 2

Interculturality in an intensive Care Unit

Section: TEACHING TO LEARN

Authors

Lourdes Casillas Santana

Position

Enfermera. Unidad de Cuidados Intensivos. Hospital de Móstoles. Profesora Colaboradora EUE Universidad Alfonso X El Sabio (Unidad Docente de Móstoles).

Contact address

C/ Narciso Serra, 30, 2º C. 28007 Madrid.

Contact email: lcasillas28@enfermundi.com

Abstract

Nurses in Intensive Care Units have to face extreme emergency situations and death on a daily basis. In recent years, to this, we need to ad the affluence of sick people from other ethnic groups. This makes it necessary for us to leave prejudice behind and to come closer to these people so that we can learn about their ways of life and other ways to handle a situation of extreme severity or even death, without taking into consideration other ethnocentric ideas or attitudes.
The purpose of this paper is to determine the vision that nursing professionals working in Intensive Care Units have on the different ways to approach severe disease and death in different cultural settings from an anthropological point of view. This involves an approximation to all the phenomena that take place in our work setting so that we get to understand people from an ethnic background different to ours.
The main objective is to make professionals aware of the existence of some problems and of the need to have a better understanding of other life styles in an effort to bring these patients closer, patients that on top of everything are away from their natural surroundings, in a strange environment, and in an extreme health status. It is only through this better understanding and respect that we can all coexist in terms of equality and difference. This entails putting ethnocentrism to a side and to approach healthcare from an interculturality perspective.

Keywords:

interculturality; ethnocentrism; facing disease; severe diseasedeath

Versión en Español

Título:

Interculturalidad en una Unidad de Cuidados Intensivos