Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Culture is a big part of life, which cannot be left out when providing care in hospitals, nursing homes, or communities. Many immigrants, refugees, and Indigenous people in Canada display diverse cultures during their hospital visits. Unfortunately, many healthcare workers fail to understand people from different cultures because of their cultural background or the patient's language, choices, or expectations. This issue poses a massive challenge to how healthcare workers talk to, understand, and care for their patients. Many patients have complained of difficulty speaking English with their doctors or nurses or not trusting them, unfair treatment, disrespect, or even racism from healthcare staff. Several undergraduate student nurses struggle to interact with patients from different cultures during clinical practicum because they lack the knowledge, skills, and confidence. Very little research has been done in Canada to study problems with intercultural communication in healthcare or how best to support upcoming nurses in developing empathetic intercultural communication skills. No intercultural communication model has been found to guide nurse educators, either. In this study, we want to talk to some key people who can help student nurses build their skills and knowledge to interact with and understand their patients from different cultures. Nurses who teach students at the hospitals and schools, patients, family caregivers, and 4th-year student nurses will be interviewed to get ideas to solve the problem. We believe this study will help us understand the big picture, provide information to develop an intercultural communication model that can support nursing education, and make student nurses better at communicating, understanding, and caring for patients from different cultures. If we understand the big picture from these key people, we can improve nursing curricula, communication protocols and policies, conduct more research, and reduce patients' worries.