Multicultural Instructional Methods Enhance Clinical Internships

Abstract

Nurse Practitioner (NP) education emphasizes teaching students to evaluate patients of varying cultural backgrounds. However, few schools have clinical assignments that demonstrate how the students have addressed the patients’ multicultural needs. NP students log individual multicultural characteristics of patients, yet fail to integrate those cultural differences when assessing, diagnosing, or developing the patients’ treatment plans. NP internship preparation culminates the educational process where students demonstrate high-level competencies of assessment, ordering labs and diagnostic tests, and determining differential and final diagnosis with a variety of culturally diverse patients. This paper will showcase multicultural instructional methods used to teach and evaluate NP students’ in their clinical internships. Examples include icebreakers, case studies, anticipatory guidance project, thinking skills and student self-evaluation. These cultural teaching and learning activities within the clinical internships have been recognized as meeting the needs of a diverse multicultural population leading to high-quality patient care.