Introduction
In the Middle East, foreign and national nurses bring their cultural values and beliefs to their caring actions and relationships with patients. Within this complex cultural environment, non-Arab non-Muslim nurses find Western derived nursing models incomplete for the care of their Arab Muslim patients. Arab Muslim nurses blend the science of nursing from the Western bio-medical model with spiritual and holistic caring from their Muslim worldview.
The Crescent of Care (COCM©) nursing model was the outcome of ethnographic research on Arab Muslim nurses’ caring models (Lovering, 2008) and captures the centrality of spirituality in caring and the blending of Western nursing science with spiritual-cultural caring values. The COCM© model was developed for application at the bedside to guide the care of Arab Muslim patients as part of the nursing Professional Practice Model at King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Center (Gen Org) – Jeddah in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The COCM© enables nurses of diverse cultural backgrounds to provide family centered care within the cultural framework. Strategies for implementation included education and clinically focused application for use of the model at the bedside.
The model has been disseminated regionally and internationally through publication and conference presentations. The model has been validated for application within Saudi Arabia and the UAE and implemented in two other hospital and ambulatory settings. The wider applicability of the COCM© to other patient populations with the focus on culturally congruent family centered care is being explored; and application of the model as the basis for nursing curricula in the Middle East region.