Enhancing nursing students’ cross-cultural competence: The impact of a design thinking-based multicultural education program

Purpose: This study aimed to examine the influence of a multicultural education program applying design thinking on the cross-cultural communication skills, cultural empathy, and cultural competency of nursing students. Methods: A non-equivalent control group pretest–posttest experimental design was adopted. We administered online questionnaires from March 9 to June 15, 2023, to 43 nursing students from the cities of Changwon and Gangneung. We used descriptive statistics, independent t-tests, chi-square tests, and repeated measures ANOVA to analyze the data with IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows 28.0 software. Results: We observed significant differences between the two groups after applying the multicultural education program. All variables showed significant differences before and after the multicultural education program between the experimental and control groups: cross-cultural communication skills (F=12.68, <i>p</i><.001), cultural empathy (F=5.05, <i>p</i>=.030), and cultural competency (F=4.74, <i>p</i>=.035), indicating an interaction effect between the experimental and control groups. Conclusion: The multicultural education program applying design thinking was effective in improving the cross-cultural communication skills, cultural empathy, and cultural competency of the nursing students. Therefore, the program developed in this study may be used to enhance the quality of nursing care provided to individuals from multicultural backgrounds.