How do various cultures view the nursing role?

Multicollinearity, BSN, RN · Oct 29, 2007

Since nursing has been a primarily female profession, I would think you would find each culture views nursing similar to how they view women in their culture. So in highly patriarchal cultures, attitudes towards nurses will correlate accordingly. In more egalitarian cultures, nurses would be viewed with more respect and assumed autonomy, etc.

NursingAgainstdaOdds · Oct 29, 2007

I find this topic fascinating as well, but I haven't found a lot on the subject. I'm going to Turkey next year, and I'm hoping to set-up a cultural exchange of sorts with the nurses there - show them what nurses' roles are in the US (via Powerpoint demo, maybe in real life if a nurse were able to get permission to travel) and learn about their roles and challenges in Turkey. I'm also interested in how the day-to-day challenges of nurses change from culture to culture. I was thinking about this the other day when caring for one of the four morbidly obese patients on our unit right now. This type of patient is quite common for us as a result of the obesity epidemic in the US - I just wonder what types of patients are common for nurses in other cultures as lifestyles, health care availability, etc change.

Great question. Please post if you find some resources on the topic.