Racism In Nursing Essay

Register to read the introduction… Racism has been around for hundreds of years. There is no room for racism in nursing, although it does happen. The patients that nurses are treating are in a vulnerable state. They should be able to feel comfortable with their healthcare professional and should be able to trust them and the decisions they make regarding their care. The mission of the College of Nurses of Ontario is ”to protect the public’s right to quality nursing services by providing leadership to the nursing profession in self-regulation (College of Nurses of Ontario, 2009, p.2) and they define nursing as the therapeutic relationship that enables the client to attain, maintain or regain optimal function by promoting the client’s health through assessing, providing care for and treating the client’s health conditions. This is achieved by supportive, preventive, therapeutic, palliative and rehabilitative means. The relationship with an individual client may be a direct practice role or it may be indirect, by means of management, education or research roles (CNO, 2009, Para 4). If racism is present when a nurse is treating a patient then the care that they receive may not be in their best interest. The patient may not trust the nurse …show more content…
I assumed that it was present in numerous aspects of life. Although it is not as predominant as it once was it still does occur. I did not however assume that there was racism present in the nursing field. As a nurse you are meant to provide client based care regardless of age, race, sex, religion or any other factors. After reading the article Racism and Its Implications in Ethical-Moral Reasoning in Nursing Practice: A tentative approach to a largely unexplored topic and relating it to the numerous theories on racism and ethnocentrism I am now more aware of racisms presence in the nursing field. I was naïve in thinking that everyone that became a nurse was neutral in their thought processes. I was also naive in not acknowledging my own prejudices. It is human nature to have preconceived notions based on a lack of knowledge and understanding. Being human I am guilty of being prejudice. The key is being aware of this knowledge gap and correcting it. I have been prejudice in my past and it was simply because of my numerous undesirable previous experiences. As earlier stated prejudice usually come from distorted misinterpretation of past experiences or pure lack of knowledge (Leninger, 1999).I have had numerous unpleasant encounters with males of Middle Eastern descent and as a result I have unintentionally avoided situations where I would have to interact with them. It is completely unfair and unwarranted to assume that