Impact of Creative Drama on Nursing Students' Cultural Competence

With the impact of international migration, globalisation, and demographic changes, societies are becoming increasingly multicultural. The increase in cultural diversity poses a challenge to all social structures in any host country and also affects health care providers responsible for providing quality care to patients with diverse cultural backgrounds, especially those with health compliance needs In this context, working in a culturally diverse environment affects nurses the most as professionals who are directly interested in patient care and more closely experience cultural diversity. Providing culturally competent care places both a moral and a professional responsibility on nurses. Therefore, cultural competence education should have an important place in nursing programs whereby nursing students should be aware of their cultural values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors and be able to communicate effectively with individuals with different cultural backgrounds In this direction, it is stated that the cultural competence trainings should be included in the nursing programs and intervention practices should be realized to improve the perceptions and skills of nursing students about their cultural care competencies.

Research with nursing students shows that levels of cultural competence are generally at an intermediate level. These studies suggest that interventions that improve cultural competence for nursing students are recommended. There are different theories, models or standards that guide interventions on cultural competence. One of them is the Papadopoulos Model.

Developed by Papadopoulos, Tilki and Taylor, the model is a continuous and successive model consisting of four dimensions of cultural awareness, cultural knowledge, cultural sensitivity and cultural practice to offer effective care in health care for the cultural beliefs and needs of individuals In the literature, there was no study using model-based and creative drama technique to increase cultural competence. Using creative drama, students try to understand how to integrate their theoretical knowledge into professional practice and explore how to react in various situations through a reflective process. Creative drama provides students with a clinical environment as close as possible to real life through players who portray patients, their relatives, and healthcare professionals. As a player or audience, students are involved in the evolving situation in real time and can imagine how they would react to it. They think about how they will react to these situations in a safe environment and can discuss these experiences with the instructor after observing the consequences of their decisions.

This project, which will be carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of creative drama workshops applied to nursing students based on the model of Papadopoulos, will use a randomized controlled experimental design by following the CONSORT guidelines.

Creative drama workshops will be applied to the intervention group. The creative drama workshops, which will be prepared based on the Papadopoulos model after the pre-testing, will be held in the practice laboratory of the Faculty of Nursing for two days a week for 4 weeks. To increase the effectiveness of creative drama applications, keeping the number of participants below 25 is important. This limitation is critical in increasing intra-group interaction, ensuring participants are more actively and efficiently involved. In this direction, the workshops are planned in two groups, each consisting of 20 people. Thus, both group dynamics will be maintained, and individual contributions of the participants will be allowed to come to the fore. These creative drama workshops aim to improve the cultural proficiency levels of nursing students, and in this process, they aim to increase cultural competence skills. Each workshop is planned to last two hours.