Cultural Repatterning
Cultural repatterning refers to assistive, supportive, facilitative, or enabling nurse actions and decisions that help people of a particular culture to change or modify a cultural practice for new or different health care patterns that are meaningful, satisfying, and beneficial. Successful repatterning is likely to occur when cultural values and beliefs are respected while at the same time there is a co-creation of interventions with the client to provide for a healthier health pattern than before the changes were developed. For example, a culturally competent school nurse who works with Mexican-Americans knows of the high incidence of obesity among women 20 years and older. Using this information, she developed a health education program for Mexican teenagers in the local high school, while respecting their cultural traditions, the nurse discussed weight management strategies with the teenagers. The nurse understood the teenagers' cultural issues pertaining to food and knew how to negotiate with them. She discouraged the use of fried foods (such as tortillas), sour cream, and regular cheese and encouraged and demonstrated the use of baked tortillas and salsa as dip and topping. In another example, a nurse discovered during her instructions on diabetes self-management that pregnant Haitian women were visiting an herbalist to obtain teas so they would not have to take insulin. The nurse asked for the names of the herbs in the teas that they were drinking and scheduled a conference with the pharmacist to discuss the specific ingredients in the herbs as well as ways that they might help clients meet their cultural needs. The nurse found out that one of the herbs contributed to high blood pressure, a problem that many of the women were experiencing. She negotiated with