Provision of culturally competent health care: an interim status review and report.

This review reports on the current nursing literature as it relates to the progress the nursing community has made in the field of transcultural nursing. This review also reports on the current status of the nursing professions' initiative to integrate multi-cultural, diversity training into its educational programs and on the degree to which nurses' report on their preparedness to provide exemplary, culturally competent care following their educational training. The literature reveals we are still only beginning to understand how nursing's educators and employers can provide critical learning environments and workplaces for students, faculty and practitioners to grasp the concepts of transcultural nursing and to evaluate the effectiveness of our actions following training. This status report provides the nursing profession with opportunities to be creative in designing cultural immersion experiences, faculty workshops, educational programs, certification programs, and qualitative and quantitative evaluation tools to measure the effectiveness of our cultural competence programs and experiences. Further opportunities include the dissemination of important concepts and findings through research, conferences, scholarly journals, nursing publications, staff development programs, and continuing education programs.