Nursing Program Philosophy: Values, Culture & Universality
This paper examines the foundational values and ideals that should inform a nursing program philosophy in a multicultural society. It argues that while objective truth is fixed, values and ideals vary significantly across cultures, requiring nursing programs to move beyond purely Western grand theories. Drawing on Leininger and McFarland's transcultural nursing framework, the paper contends that an effective nursing program philosophy must emphasize universal human values — such as caring, professional standards, and evidence-based practice — while remaining flexible enough to accommodate diverse cultural approaches to patient care, particularly in sensitive contexts such as end-of-life care.
- Introduction: Truth, Values, and Nursing Philosophy: Distinguishing objective truth from culturally shaped values
- Cultural Differences in Nursing Practice: Western vs. non-Western nursing approaches contrasted
- Challenges of Philosophy in a Multicultural Society: Difficulty of forming one philosophy across cultures
- Leininger's Transcultural Nursing Theory: Applying transcultural theory to nursing program design
- Grand Theories and Their Limitations Today: Classical theories critiqued for modern multicultural settings
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper anchors abstract philosophical discussion in a concrete, relatable example — contrasting Western and non-Western approaches to end-of-life care — making the argument accessible and persuasive.
- It integrates a recognized theoretical framework (Leininger's transcultural nursing theory) to lend scholarly credibility to its recommendations.
- The paper maintains a clear argumentative thread throughout: universal values are necessary, but cultural flexibility is equally essential for an effective nursing philosophy.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates the technique of using a theoretical lens to evaluate a practical problem. Rather than simply describing nursing philosophies, the author applies Leininger's diversity and universality theory as a framework for critiquing existing grand theories and proposing a more culturally adaptive alternative. This positions the argument within established nursing scholarship while advancing a distinct, reasoned position.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by distinguishing objective truth from subjective values, then uses end-of-life care as a case study of cultural difference. It transitions to the challenge of forming a philosophy in multicultural settings, introduces Leininger's theory as a solution, and closes by critiquing classical grand theories as insufficiently responsive to modern diversity. The conclusion synthesizes these threads into a call for flexible, universally grounded nursing program philosophies.
Introduction: Truth, Values, and Nursing Philosophy
The values and ideals that inform a nursing program philosophy should be universal in nature, because nurses are members of the community and serve the community. This may seem to complicate the task of developing such a philosophy, but ultimately it should simplify it. The question of truth, however, is a non-issue. There is only one truth — facts are facts. The idea that different people can experience different truths is false; they can experience different opinions, their interpretation of truth colored by various biases, but there is no reason to grant credence to bias-laden versions of reality. Objective truth is supported by fact and is not changeable by any individual.
Values and ideals, however, are quite another matter. Values and ideals arise from individual experiences, cultural influences, and a variety of other factors — and they can differ considerably from person to person and culture to culture.
Cultural Differences in Nursing Practice
Health care in the West is generally focused on illness. When this manifests in something like end-of-life care, nurses and other health care practitioners typically treat symptoms such as pain but tend to remain emotionally detached from the patient. Non-Western cultures sometimes take an entirely different perspective, often one that is more patient-focused — not in the sense of focusing on the patient's symptoms, but rather on their mental and emotional state. In particular, where Western medicine tends to treat end-of-life care much like any other care, other cultures view the dying process as something fundamentally different from routine health care. This leads to an approach that is warmer, less oriented toward symptom management, and more oriented toward guiding the patient through the process of dying in a manner consistent with their own cultural context. There are, therefore, sometimes significant differences in how nurses approach their roles under different value systems (Lutz & Bowers, 2000).
A concrete example of this contrast is palliative and end-of-life care, where cultural values most visibly shape the nurse-patient relationship. In some traditions, the family plays a central and active role in care decisions; in others, the primary relationship is between the clinician and the individual patient. Neither model is inherently superior — they reflect deeply held values about personhood, community, and the meaning of death itself.
Challenges of Philosophy in a Multicultural Society
In a multicultural society, where nurses and patients alike come from different cultural backgrounds, establishing a philosophy for a nursing program is challenging. There are different ways to conceive of a nurse's role in patient care. It is best, therefore, not to allow any one individual or any single culture to strictly dictate the philosophy. Instead, there should be a genuine effort to identify a philosophy that embraces the more universal values binding all of humanity.
Leininger's Transcultural Nursing Theory
Leininger's diversity and universality theory addresses this issue directly through the framework of transcultural nursing (Leininger & McFarland, 2008). In this theory, cultural dynamics are understood to influence the nurse-client relationship in meaningful ways (Leininger & McFarland, 2008). A nursing program philosophy should therefore emphasize basic human values such as caring, adherence to professional standards, and commitment to evidence-based practice. Beyond these foundational elements, however, the philosophy must also acknowledge that the specific nature of the nurse-patient relationship can and should change depending on the needs of each individual patient. Nurses should remain flexible in how they approach that relationship. Understanding cultural differences and adapting to them can have a distinctly positive influence on patient outcomes.
References
Leininger, M. & McFarland, M. (2008). Culture care diversity and universality: A worldwide nursing theory. Jones and Bartlett Publishers: Sudbury, MA.
Lutz, B. & Bowers, B. (2000). Patient-centered care: Understanding its interpretation and implementation in health care. Scholarly Inquiry for Nursing Practice, 14(2), 183–187.
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