Abstract

Indigenous communities still use the application of empirical information; Madeleine Leininger’s theory holds that cultural care provides the broadest and most important means to study, explain and predict nursing knowledge and concomitant nursing care practice which main goal is to document, to know, to predict and to make clear this process in a systematic way. This theory focuses on describing, explaining and predicting the different personal or cultural communities points of view and the way they can applied for an accurate assessment.The present research was carried out based on Madeleine Leininger’s theory in order to apply it in pregnant women belong to an indigenous reservation in Nariño Department taking into account their cultural differences. During the subsequent research five women were studied and gave the information related to particular cultural values, beliefs and life ways. Socio-demographic characteristics such as: age, education, marital status, social health insurance, socioeconomic level, among others, prenatal/postnatal care knowledge, pregnancy, related health behaviors, were also described and analyzed.The research was based on the qualitative paradigm; this method gave the enough information about the knowledge and practices related to the health care offered in health institutions. According to the results most of indigenous reservation women have social health insurance but they don’t take advantage of different services that health institutions offer due to the fact they do not have knowledge concerning the importance of the prenatal control.