Transcultural family health care nursing is defined (Hohashi, 2023) as "a knowledge system for practices of family intervention that touch on the family system unit from the perspective of culture." Culture is formed from the beliefs and sense of values that guide people's behaviors. Then, the wisdom of "cultural family support" must be harnessed in order to understand the differences that characterize the targeted families (i.e., family differences), as well as to provide culturally-relevant support to families and individual family members.
At the Kobe University Graduate School of Health Sciences, as part of the program leading to the Certified Nurse Specialist (CNS) in family health nursing, a course in "Transcultural family health care nursing" (two credits) is now offered. Instruction takes up a variety of actual support applied to diverse families, including macro cultural aspects in the United States and Hong Kong, as well as in urban and rural areas of Japan, and micro cultural aspects such as single-parent and two-parent families.
Naohiro Hohashi, PhD, RN, PHN, FAAN