Current Issues in Cultural Diversity and Hispanic Nursing

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Current Issues in Cultural Diversity and Hispanic Nursing
Description of Issue
Hispanics are the fastest-growing demographic population in the United States and yet they only make up only 5% of the nursing workforce. Hispanic nurses are often overlooked due to prejudice and are usually not appointed to positions of leadership in nursing. Many of these nurses are not returning to school to further their education beyond an Associated of Science in Nursing because they feel that regardless of their education they will remain unappointed to supervisory positions. Furthermore, there is a lack of Hispanic mentors in higher education and in nursing leadership positions consequently creating a vicious cycle. To help eliminate health care disparities, recruiting and retaining Hispanic nursing students is a necessary step.
History
Historically, career advancement in nursing has been difficult and limited for Hispanics primarily because of their lack of advanced educational preparation in nursing and related disciplines such as management (Cowen & Moorhead, 2006). Few Hispanic nurses have been employed at the level of director or dean in the history of nursing in the United States (Cowen and Moorhead, 2006). In my opinion this is the result of social engineering and hidden agendas.
Hispanics have been described as the "missing persons" in the health professions at a time when a lack of cultural diversity in the workforce has been linked to health disparities. (Bond, Gray and Baxley). Graduating and hiring more Hispanic nurses will eliminates many disparities that are and have been present for a very long time. Spanish is one of the fastest growing second languages throughout the world. It is currently the national official language of 21 countries. The term Hispanic was coined by the US federal government in the 1970’s to refer to Americans born in a Spanish speaking

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