Transcultural Health Care Practice: An educational resource for nurses and health care practitioners

Editors: Charles Husband and Bren Torry

(All modules published 2004)

Introduction to the materials

These modules have been written by a large number of individuals who have each drawn upon their professional expertise and experience in preparing their own contributions to the whole programme. Many contributions have emerged from collaborations between colleagues who are actively engaged in delivering professional education and training within the same higher educational establishment. Consequently, across these materials can be found the distinctive styles and priorities of professionals addressing the challenge of contributing to the development of transcultural health care practice. Additionally, all of these modules have been subject to a process of piloting and revision which has seen a further 25 institutions across the United Kingdom being involved in the development of the materials. This piloting process enabled the materials to be appraised by practitioners and educators with very different minority ethnic client populations: and within institutions located within widely differing multi-ethnic demographics. Finally, the revised materials have benefited from a Department of Health peer review process.

From quite early within this developmental process a decision was made about how the planned materials should be disseminated to potential users. That decision has had an important impact upon how the whole programme has been structured and upon how individual modules have been conceived. In essence, the decision was made to attempt to optimise the accessibility of these materials to any potential user. That meant minimising the cost of access to the materials and maximising the potential flexibility about how they might be used.

By placing these materials on the Royal College of Nursing web site we have been very fortunate in being able to locate them in a situation where a large proportion of their potential users will have familiarity with the web site topology. And, the materials are located adjacent to a major resource of related relevant materials.

Whilst the Royal College of Nursing retains the copyright on these materials in order to protect them from inappropriate misuse, that some legal authority allows the Royal College of Nursing to permit individual users the right to exploit these materials for their own professional development, or to facilitate their activities in training or teaching others. These materials are available FREE TO USER and are intended to be ASSET STRIPPED. You may download whole modules or sections in order to facilitate your own learning: or, in order to do a scissors and paste job in integrating them into your own teaching materials or training pack. There is no limit on how extensive this might be in each case. That is a function of your needs and creativity.

All that is required if you reproduce or disseminate all or parts of these materials for your own purposes is that you explicitly acknowledge their authorship and origin. In other words, there is no financial constraint on your use of these materials; you merely should not pass them off as your own. You are, in fact, encouraged to exploit these materials.

The decision to disseminate the materials in this way and with this ethos had, of course, a direct impact upon how the whole programme was structured. The individual modules have been planned to be both free standing, self-contained texts; and to be complementary and mutually supportive. In essence, a core of six practice centred modules is framed by six more discursive modules that will help the practitioner to more adequately contextualize their practice. To some extent these six 'framing' modules allow the reader to follow-up in more depth some of the issues raised in the practice modules.

Figure 1 below outlines this structure:

Contextual diagram