Kaminie Govender

Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs Hospital, Saudi Arabia

Title: Cohesion Challenges In A Multicultural Team: A Descriptive Qualitative Study In A Cardiac Centre Of A Designated Hospital In Saudi Arabia

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Biography

Kaminie Govender is an accomplished nursing leader with over 18 years of experience in military, VIP, surgical, and cardiac nursing. As a specialized Nurse Practitioner and healthcare innovator, she is dedicated to advancing patient safety, quality improvement, and compassionate nursing leadership.

She holds a Master's degree in Nursing Management and is pursuing a PhD in Nursing, focusing on artificial intelligence in healthcare and its impact on multicultural nursing teams, collaboration, and patient outcomes. Passionate about transforming healthcare, she is committed to empowering nurses through research, innovation, and inclusive leadership.

Abstract

Introduction: The World Health Organization predicts a global shortage of 5.7 million nurses by 2030. Many public and private healthcare services will. Therefore, they experience shortages globally and will have to recruit nurses from other countries. Foreign nurses’ poor understanding of their colleagues’ and patients’ cultural backgrounds may contribute to the teams’ challenges to deliver quality care and promote team cohesion

Methods: The researcher opted to use a descriptive qualitative design, and the preferred data collection method was individual face-to-face interviews to explore and understand the participants’ perceptions of the cohesion challenges that their multicultural nursing team experienced. The researcher led the interviews with the open-ended question, ‘What cohesion challenges did the multicultural nursing team of a cardiac centre in a designated hospital in Saudi Arabia ‘and also used probing questions that guided the participants’ responses to enable a deeper understanding of the participant. The interviews were audio-recorded as permitted by the participants.

Results/ Findings : A thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. During the analysis, six categories with subcategories were developed. The study findings revealed that cohesion in a multicultural nursing team requires good communication, the inclusion of all nurses, the prioritising of nurses’ needs by managers and the need for meaningful team-building events. The participants highlighted a need to be given the opportunity to share their experiences and for the nurses to know and understand the benefits of multicultural teams.

Conclusion and Recommendation: Therefore, the study recommends a need for cultural competence training, effective communication practices and salary reviews that will encourage trust, understanding and acceptance of each other and ultimately lead to improved team cohesion. The study findings also highlighted the poor consideration and role modelling of nurse managers as a contributing aspect of poor team cohesion. However, the nurse manager’s findings showed that the poor organisational support towards meaningful team-building events was also a challenge in promoting team cohesion. It is possible to conclude from the study findings that the study objectives were met and that the research question was answered.