»Wer fürchtet sich vorm Schwarzen Mann?« Fremde Gefühle bei der Pflege kulturfremder Patienten

Abstract

It is easy for someone to become marginalised (a »black person« as a German nursery rhyme puts it), i. e. a mixture of knowledge, emotions, hearsay and value judgments. Two observations require attention: 1) People from foreign cultures easily become victims of such judgments. 2) People from one's own culture, too, may come into that position. The phenomenon does not depend on the distance of a culture but on its strangeness. The article lists characteristics of persons from foreign as well as kindred cultures that make them candidates for becoming marginalised. We often meet a climate of prejudice in hospitals. Nursing which is not prepared for transcultural contact can emphasize this situation. Often nurses show feelings towards patients that have not been examined for their inherent prejudices and effects on the patients. Such mechanisms of stigmatisation may influence the practice of nursing. The last part of this paper considers possible solutions to these problems.