Cultural Safety in Healthcare: Ensuring Respect and Equity in Patient Care

Running head: CULTURAL SAFETY
CULTURAL SAFETY:
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
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CULTURAL SAFETY
Introduction:
Cultural Safety is the concept of care that was first advocated by the Maori nurses in the
nation of New Zealand in the late 1980s. It mainly helps in creating an atmosphere for the
service users where they feel that their cultural traditions, perceptions and inhibitions are
respected and interventions are designed according to their cultural requirements (Durey et al.,
2017). The goal of the cultural safety by the nurses is to ensure that all service users feel
respected as well as safe when they successfully interact with the health care system. Culturally
safe health care services would be free from any form of racism as well as discrimination by the
healthcare services (Cross et al., 2017). The culturally competent nursing professionals should
always support the service users by drawing strengths from their identity as well as culture and
community. This assignment would focus how nurses while providing care to indigenous people
can ensure cultural safety.
Cultural safety:
Cultural safety always requires a proper level of cognitive, attitudes as well as personal
skills, which will help in enhancing effective communication as well as interaction with the
others. Every nursing professionals need to develop cultural competence by involving into
personal reflective practice as an effective means of recognizing specific beliefs and values that
are inherent in the culture of nursing. They would also need to reflect on the aspects of one’s
own culture that may conflict with the culture of patients or other workers (Cameron et al.,
2014). Accordingly, they would develop specific skills that would help in being more affluent in
ensuring cultural safety towards patients. Development of culturally safe practices always require
the capacity for making adjustments to different services that successfully accommodate

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CULTURAL SAFETY
culturally different needs of the patients. In order to develop cultural safety, nurses need to go
through three important steps to develop cultural safety.
The first important step is to develop cultural awareness or cultural consciousness. This
trait can be discussed as the development of awareness of the different construct of one’s own
culture as well as recognition of the unique and similar qualities of other cultural groups
(Karatay et al., 2016). Another important component is the cultural appraisal as well as the
assessment for the identification of the cultural domains of differences that nurses need to
considered by the nurses while developing care interventions for the patients. Another important
trait is the cultural safety skill development that would comprise of different appropriate
behaviors, communications, attitudes and other strategies that help in reduction of the gap of
inequities in the patient health outcomes. When nursing professionals can successfully develop
all the above-mentioned traits, they can successfully become culturally competent and thereby
ensure following cultural safety in their healthcare practices.
Cultural considerations:
Health is traditionally a holistic concept for the Aboriginal as well as Torres islander
people. The cultural beliefs of such groups regarding their health issues mainly encompass the
different physical, emotional as well a social, spiritual and cultural well-being not only of a
particular individual but also of the whole community. Studies have stated that the indigenous
people possess a whole-of-life view and mainly include the concept of life-death-life (Hart et al.,
2015). Therefore, different cultural aspects of the indigenous people should be considered while
caring for the patients for ensuring that their holistic health as well as their individual needs is
met successfully. Researchers are of the opinion that kinship, family obligations and even the