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ABSTRACT
Nursing students in an urban university in southwestern Pennsylvania began visiting newly relocated Somali refugees as part of their community health nursing (CHN) clinical coursework. The purpose of this qualitative study was to relate the students' experiences in their clinical visits with the refugees to the development of cultural competence. Findings identify the many challenges confronted by students and present strategies for resolution. The level of skills needed for the care of vulnerable populations should be considered when assigning undergraduate students to the clinical setting.
Schools of nursing have a responsibility to provide culturally specific student learning experiences (American Nurses Association, 1991; White, 2003). These experiences can then serve as the foundation for the development of cultural competence. Cultural content may be found in most nursing school curricula, but students may not have optimal experience working with clients from diverse cultures. This may be due to lack of faculty preparation with cultural diversity (Kardong-Edgren et al. , 2005) or lack of exposure to diverse cultural groups, including individuals with various ethnic backgrounds, homeless individuals, individuals with physical and mental disabilities, and those with differing sexual identities (Eliason & Raheim, 2000).
As part of the clinical component of the community health nursing (CHN) course, students at a small Catholic university in southwestern Pennsylvania developed a multifaceted approach to solving a problem of community population. The community population consisted of 180 Somali refugees who began arriving in the region in February 2004. For the prior 10 years, these Somali refugees had lived in refugee camps in Kenya after escaping war in Somalia. Beginning in the 1990s, Somali refugees have been relocated throughout the United States, representing one of the largest groups for resettlement since the 1990s (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2004).
Study Purpose
The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore CHN students' experiences of their clinical visits with these newly arrived Somali refugees. It represented the beginning of future participatory action research with this group of Somali refugees (Olshansky et al., 2005) and helped students develop skills in cultural competence.
Cultural competence was defined by Smith (1998) as:
a continuous process of cultural awareness, knowledge, skill, interaction, and sensitivity among caregivers and the services they provide, (p. 9)
Campinha-Bacote's (2003) model...