Cultural safety
means creating an environment where everyone feels respected and valued, especially people from different cultural backgrounds. It's about understanding and honouring their unique needs, experiences, and identities. This involves:
Respect: Valuing and respecting people's cultural differences.
Awareness: Awareness of your cultural beliefs and biases and how they might affect others.
Inclusivity: Ensuring everyone's cultural practices and perspectives are included and respected in all settings.
Empathy: Listening to and understanding the experiences and challenges people from different cultures face.
Safety: Ensuring that people feel safe and supported to express their cultural identity without fear of discrimination or prejudice.
1) Cultural safety aims to improve the health status of New Zealanders and is applied to all relationships through
- An emphasis on health gains and positive health outcomes
2) Cultural safety aims to enhance the delivery of health and disability services through a culturally safe nursing workforce by:
Identifying the power relationship between the service provider and those who use the service. Working alongside others rather than ‘above’.
Empowering the service users, people should be able to express degrees of perceived risk or safety.
Preparing nurses to understand the diversity within their cultural reality and the impact of that on any person who differs in any way from themselves.
Applying social science concepts that underpin the art of nursing practice. Understanding nursing is more than carrying out tasks.
3) Cultural safety is broad in its application: - Recognising inequalities within healthcare interactions that represent the microcosm of inequalities in health that have prevailed throughout history and within our nation more generally. - Addressing the cause and effect relationship of history, political, social, and employment status, housing, education, gender and personal experience.
Accepting the legitimacy of difference and diversity in human behaviours and social structure.
Accepting that the attitudes and beliefs, policies and practices of health and disability service providers can act as barriers to service access.
Concerning quality improvement in service delivery and consumer rights.
4) Cultural safety has a close focus on:
Understanding the impact of the nurse as a bearer of his/her own culture, history, attitudes and life experiences and the response to other people make to these factors. -
Challenging nurses to examine their practice carefully, recognising the power relationship in nursing is biased towards the service provider.
Balancing the power relationship in the practice of nursing so that every consumer receives an effective service