Cultural Accommodation
Cultural accommodation refers to assistive, supportive, facilitative, or enabling nurse actions and decisions that help clients of a particular culture accept nursing strategies, or negotiate with nurses to achieve satisfying health care outcomes. Nurses may support and facilitate successful use of home burial of placenta alongside interventions from the biomedical health care system. For example, the delivery nurse was very helpful when Ms. Sanchez asked her not to discard a piece of the amniotic sac that was present on her grandbaby's face immediately after birth. Ms. Sanchez asked the nurse to give it to her instead. The grandmother believed that being born with a piece of the amniotic sac on the face was a visible sign that something special was going to happen in the person's life. The grandmother explained that after she dried the piece of the amniotic sac, she would keep it in a safe place. She would also spend extra time protecting the baby to prevent her from being harmed. Although the delivery room nurse was not knowledgeable about this practice, she was assistive and gave the grandmother the piece of the sac as she requested.