Health beliefs of two heritages essay: a planning guide

The essay has two halves and they are not equally difficult. Describing the health beliefs of two heritages and looking for similarities is comprehension: the material is in chapters 13 and 28 of Purnell, and a careful reader can do it. The second half — how those beliefs influence the delivery of evidence-based healthcare, focusing on nursing care — is analysis, and it is where the marks separate. Plan the essay so the second half has room, because a 700-word paper that spends 550 words describing two cultures has answered the easier question twice. At 700 words the arithmetic is tight: roughly 300 for the two heritages and their similarity, and 400 for the influence on care, which is the reverse of how most students instinctively divide it.

The similarity question is worth taking seriously rather than answering with a sentence. It is a genuinely interesting prompt because similarity between heritages usually appears at the level of function rather than practice. Two groups may use entirely different remedies and share an underlying belief about balance, or share the expectation that a family rather than an individual receives a diagnosis, or both treat certain illnesses as having a moral or spiritual cause. Naming the shared function beneath two different practices is a stronger answer than listing coincidences, and it is what makes the comparison analytic instead of descriptive. It also protects you from the opposite error, which is asserting a similarity that is really just a feature of most human cultures — respect for elders and concern for family are not findings, they are near-universals, and citing them as similarities says nothing about these two heritages in particular.

The Purnell model gives you a structure and using it explicitly will improve the essay's shape. Its domains — communication, family roles and organisation, nutrition, pregnancy and childbearing, death rituals, spirituality, healthcare practices and healthcare practitioners among them — let you compare the two heritages on the same axes instead of writing two separate portraits. Comparing on shared axes is also what makes the similarity question answerable, since a similarity is only visible when the two accounts are lined up. Pick three or four domains rather than all of them; at this length, four domains covered properly for both heritages is more useful than nine covered in a sentence each. Choose the domains where the two groups differ most sharply or converge most surprisingly, because those are the ones with something to say.

The second half needs a definition before it needs examples. Evidence-based practice is the integration of best available research evidence with clinical expertise and patient values and preferences — and that third component is where cultural health beliefs formally enter. This matters because it changes what a belief is: not an obstacle to evidence-based care but a constituent of it. An essay that treats cultural belief as something to be overcome has misunderstood the model it is writing about, and saying so explicitly is one of the most defensible arguments available here. It also sets up the second half properly: if belief is a component of the model, then failing to elicit it is a failure of evidence-based practice rather than a failure of cultural sensitivity, and that is a sharper claim than the one most essays make.

Then get specific about the mechanisms, because this is where papers go abstract. Beliefs affect delivery through identifiable routes: whether a symptom is reported at all, who is present when it is discussed, whether a treatment is accepted or quietly not taken, whether a traditional remedy runs alongside a prescription without being disclosed, whether a family or the individual gives consent in practice, and whether the patient returns. Each of those is a point where a nursing intervention could change the outcome, and naming two or three of them concretely will carry more weight than a general statement about cultural sensitivity. Follow each mechanism to a nursing action, because the brief says the discussion should focus on nursing care: if the risk is undisclosed traditional remedies, the action is how the question gets asked and by whom; if the risk is a family rather than an individual receiving information, the action is establishing early who the patient wants present.

On mechanics: a minimum of 700 words with three evidence-based references no older than five years, excluding the class textbook. That exclusion is the constraint to watch. Purnell is the source for the two heritages, but he cannot count toward your three, so you need current peer-reviewed work on how cultural belief affects care delivery or on the two groups specifically. Search for that before you start writing, because it is easier to shape the essay around three good current sources than to find sources afterwards that happen to match what you already wrote. Check the publication years explicitly, since a source that is four years old at the time a syllabus was written may be six by the time you submit.