Cultural Awareness: An Analysis of Nurses' Cultural Competencies in Isfahan Educational Hospitals

The increasing trend of expectations due to the diversity of demand in the health and treatment services environment, especially in the competitive arena, has turned attention to cultural qualifications as a requirement in the health and treatment field into a serious issue. Therefore, cultural awareness, as a level of this competency, is considered a competitive advantage for public hospitals that offer specialized services to a wide range of clients. Many healthcare institutions are trying to develop these skills through in-service training courses; but this requires knowledge about the level of basic awareness. Based on this, the current research has investigated the level of cultural awareness of nurses with the aim of analyzing the cultural qualifications of nurses. The statistical population of this research is all nurses of the specialized training center of Isfahan educational hospitals, numbering 400 people, of which 196 people have been selected as a sample using the accessible method. The instrument for collecting field data was 36-item questionnaire of the Rew cultural awareness standard (2003), the reliability of its four dimensions was estimated to be higher than 0.7 using Cronbach's alpha. The results show that except for general educational experiences and research issues, in other dimensions, cultural awareness is above the average level. Also, the highest coefficient of influence on cultural awareness belongs to patient care with (0.35), while the highest predictive belongs to general educational experiences (0.214) and research issues (0.207).