Healthcare Decision-Making of African-American Patients: Comparing Positivist and Postmodern Approaches to Care

Abstract

Healthcare decision-making (HCDM) may be a potentially challenging time for any person. When considered against the backdrop of being a minority, experiencing disparate care based on racial bias, and confronting the implications of advanced serious illness, the practices and processes of HCDM become increasingly complex. The purpose of this paper is to consider the HCDM of African-American patients with advanced serious illness through the lens of positivism and postmodernism and to make the argument that postmodern nursing is the ideal ethical and equitable approach to HCDM. Postmodernism reengages nurses to consider HCDM of African-American patients with advanced serious illness as an individualized, contextualized, whole-person process, requiring all ways of knowing. A postmodern nursing approach may promote sustainable and human-centered health interventions that will reposition an often marginalized group to the center of practice, policy, and research progress.