Cultural Humility in Nursing: A Scoping Review of the Research Protocol
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Improving healthcare provider-healthcare recipient relationships, including how healthcare providers connect across differences with others, may improve healthcare and health equity (Lekas et al., 2020). Cultural humility is “the recognition of diversity and power imbalances among individuals, groups, or communities, with the actions of being open, self-aware, egoless, flexible, exuding respect and supportive interactions, focusing on both self and other to formulate a tailored response” (Foronda et al., 2025, p. 1-2). Although cultural humility for healthcare providers was introduced in the 1990s (Tervalon & Murray-García, 1998), it has recently gained popularity. The number of publications on cultural humility in health sciences databases such as PubMed has surged since 2015 (PubMed, 2025). This body of literature is largely predicated on the need for a paradigm shift from what traditionally has been cultural competence to cultural humility. Cultural competence treats culture as a technical skill that can be mastered by healthcare providers; not only is this unattainable, but it also leads to stereotyping and bias (Lekas et al., 2020). Additionally, cultural competency fails to address systemic drivers of health inequities (Lekas et al., 2020). Thus, cultural humility is viewed as a better fit than cultural competency towards health equity goals (First Nations Health Authority, 2018; Lekas et al., 2020; National Academy of Sciences, 2021). Nurses are the largest group of front-line healthcare providers. Enhancing cultural humility of nurses may play an important role in improving healthcare and health outcomes. Cultural humility is already being endorsed as a suitable goal for nurses (Canadian Council of Registered Nurse Regulators, 2018; Foronda, 2016; National Academy of Sciences et al., 2021). However, scientific evidence supporting the teaching and practice of cultural humility in nursing is in its infancy. To map existing research on cultural humility in nursing as an emerging topic, and to identify existing knowledge gaps to inform future research priorities, a scoping review will be undertaken (Peters et al., 2024). A traditional systematic review would be premature because at this point it is unclear what other more specific and valuable questions can be posed for evidence syntheses (Peters et al., 2024). According to a preliminary search of several health sciences databases and Google Scholar, no scoping reviews published on cultural humility in nursing were found. One scoping review protocol on the topic of cultural humility across a variety of disciplines including health disciplines has been registered (Farahani et al., 2025); however, the protocol does not address nursing specifically or the intention to inform nursing research priorities. The objective of this scoping review is to find and describe the existing body of empirical literature about cultural humility in nursing and identify gaps in the literature to inform future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.070 | 0.114 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.017 | 0.012 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.033 | 0.021 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.035 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".