Cultural safety is increasingly recognised as imperative to delivering accessible and acceptable healthcare for First Nations Peoples within Australia and in similar colonised countries. A literature review undertaken to inform the inaugural Caring for Australians with Renal Insufficiency (CARI) guidelines for clinically and culturally safe kidney care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples revealed a timeline of the emergence of culturally safe kidney care in Australia. Thirty years ago, kidney care literature was purely biomedically focused, with culture, family and community viewed as potential barriers to patient 'compliance' with treatment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
December 2023
The inclusion of Indigenous cultures, known as the cultural determinants of health, in healthcare policy and health professional education accreditation and registration requirements, is increasingly being recognised as imperative for improving the appalling health and well-being of Indigenous Australians. These inclusions are a strengths-based response to tackling the inequities in Indigenous Australians' health relative to the general population. However, conceptualising the cultural determinants of health in healthcare practice has its contextual challenges, and gaps in implementation evidence are apparent.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndigenous nurse scholars across nations colonised by Europeans articulate the need for accomplices (as opposed to mere performative allies) to work alongside them and support their ongoing struggle for health equity and respect and to prioritise and promote culturally safe healthcare. Although cultural safety is now being mandated in nursing codes of practice as a strategy to address racism in healthcare, it is important that white nurse educators have a comprehensive understanding about cultural safety and the pedagogical skills needed to teach it to undergraduate nurses. We open this article with stories of our journeys as two white nurses in becoming accomplices and working alongside Indigenous Peoples, as patients and colleagues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF: Cultural safety is mandated for Australian nursing practice and education. Cultural safety privileges the knowledge of the client, who determines whether healthcare is culturally safe. Understanding and learning cultural safety requires critical self-reflection to expose clinicians' assumptions, unconscious biases, beliefs and actions, and their impact on clients.
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