Write a two-page summary on key assumptions of Leininger’s Culture Care theory and summarize the
implications of this theory for your chosen advanced nursing role as a family nurse practitioner (FNP).
Cultural Care Theory:
Leininger’s Culture Care Theory attempts to provide culturally congruent nursing care through “cognitively
based assistive, supportive, facilitative, or enabling acts or decisions that are mostly tailor-made to fit with
individual, group’s, or institution’s cultural values, beliefs, and lifeways.” The intent of the care is to fit with or
have beneficial meaning and health outcomes for people of different or similar culture backgrounds.
Culturally congruent care is possible when the following occurs in the nurse-patient relationship: “Together the
nurse and the client creatively design a new or different care lifestyle for the health or well-being of the client.
This mode requires the use of both generic and professional knowledge and ways to fit such diverse ideas into
nursing care actions and goals. Care knowledge and skill are often repatterned for the best interest of the
clients. Thus all care modalities require coparticipation of the nurse and clients (consumers) working together
to identify, plan, implement, and evaluate each caring mode for culturally congruent nursing care. These modes
can stimulate nurses to design nursing actions and decisions using new knowledge and culturally based ways
to provide meaningful and satisfying wholistic care to individuals, groups or institutions.”
Leininger’s model has developed into a movement in nursing care called transcultural nursing. In 1995,
Leininger defined transcultural nursing as “a substantive area of study and practice focused on comparative
cultural care (caring) values, beliefs, and practices of individuals or groups of similar or different cultures with
the goal of providing culture-specific and universal nursing care practices in promoting health or well-being or
to help people to face unfavorable human conditions, illness, or death in culturally meaningful ways.”
Leininger developed new terms for the basic concepts of her theory. The concepts addressed in the model are:
Care, which assists others with real or anticipated needs in an effort to improve a human condition of concern,
or to face death.
Caring is an action or activity directed towards providing care.
Culture refers to learned, shared, and transmitted values, beliefs, norms, and lifeways to a specific individual or
group that guide their thinking, decisions, actions, and patterned ways of living.
Culture Care is the multiple aspects of culture that influence and help a person or group to improve their
human condition or deal with illness or death.
Culture Care Diversity refers to the differences in meanings, values, or acceptable forms of care in or between
groups of people.
Culture Care Universality refers to common care or similar meanings that are evident among many cultures.
Nursing is a learned profession with a disciplined focus on care phenomena.
Worldview is the way people tend to look at the world or universe in creating a personal view of what life is
about.
Cultural and Social Structure Dimensions include factors related to spirituality, social structure, political
concerns, economics, educational patterns, technology, cultural values, and ethnohistory that influence cultural
responses of people within a cultural context.
Health refers to a state of well-being that is culturally defined and valued by a designated culture.
Cultural Care Preservation or Maintenance refers to nursing care activities that help people from particular
cultures to retain and use core cultural care values related to healthcare concerns or conditions.
Cultural Care Accommodation or Negotiation refers to creative nursing actions that help people of a particular
culture adapt or negotiate with others in the healthcare community in an effort to attain the shared goal of an
optimal health outcome for patients of a designated culture.
Cultural Care Re-Patterning or Restructuring refers to therapeutic actions taken by culturally competent nurses.
These actions help a patient to modify personal health behaviors towards beneficial outcomes while respecting
the patient’s cultural values.
The theory’s culturalogical assessment provides a holistic, comprehensive overview of the client’s background.
The assessment addresses the following:
communication and language
gender considerations
sexual orientation
ability and disability
occupation
age