Cultural Safety in Health Care Provision

This article discusses the importance of cultural safety in health care provision and provides an action plan with key objectives for achieving cultural competence. It explores the barriers to cultural safety and suggests strategies for overcoming them. The article also highlights the need for staff training, translation and bilingual services, and continuous monitoring of progress.

Running head: CULTURAL SAFETY IN HEALTH CARE PROVISION 1
Cultural Safety in Health Care Provision
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

CULTURAL SAFETY IN HEALTH CARE PROVISION 2
Cultural Safety in Health Care Provision
Today, health practitioners are charged with the responsibility of providing health care,
case management, and health-related education to a greatly diverse population that is in
opposition with series of cultural, health literacy, and linguistic barriers. Currently, both
language and culture play roles in the applicability and acquisition of health literacy skills.
Primarily, so as to effectively work with culturally and linguistically diverse populations,
these goals ought to be met; develop both existing understanding and knowledge of different
population based on the diversity, highlight and explore the impact of cultural background on
health care provision, and gain insight into the repercussions of cultural incompetence. In line
with the goals, the action plan has the following four key objectives.
Establish a Culture of Cultural Safety
Central to this objective would be developing and establishing a blend between health
provision and social services (Hayden & Jalla, 2015). This will include a commitment from
leadership, organizational structures, and policies so as to successfully fix cultural safety.
Nourish Staff Capacity
Training and other professional development measures would help boost staff capacity.
Not only would such ventures enhance knowledge but also ensure medical practitioners are
skilled and well behaved towards the provision of equitable and appropriate health care that is
culturally safe.
Improvement to Client and Community Experiences

CULTURAL SAFETY IN HEALTH CARE PROVISION 3
Generally, client and community experience deserve in-depth consideration so as to
ensure culturally safe relationships are sustained.
Notably, cultural safety and in turn cultural competency are broad and would require
pooling a number of resources. This action plan is likely to be curtailed by the inadequacy of
resources such as funding and medical backing as a whole. Bearing that in mind, these barriers
can be counterbalanced by facilitated partnerships between colleagues in the medical world, and
social workers (Parnell, 2018). This move would aid in the formation of interdisciplinary
formations that could collaborate on health literacy, language, and culture.
Secondly, to counter the barriers to the action plan, funding will be made available
through campaigns via health advocates who are well versed with convincing health care funding
organizations. They would efficiently highlight how impaired means of communication
negatively impacts patient safety and health care provision. Moreover, they would go forth to
point out that countering health literacy barriers brings down costs tied to communication-related
breakdowns and health care provision errors (Henderson, Horne, Hills, & Kendall, 2018). Such
costs include but not limited to hiring interpreters and legal costs in the event of a medical error.
Essentially, the success of the action plan calls for client engagement so as to assess
whether cultural respect has been met in their care. The staff will be trained to ensure they are
knowledgeable and skilled, attitudinal behaviors will also be looked into, and finally policies will
also be revised where need be. These measures will ensure that the action plan aligns with
cultural safety requirements of health care provision.
The firm incorporation of cultural safety in the health and services care requires paying
attention to the patients’ voices. This will be made possible through increasing the awareness on

CULTURAL SAFETY IN HEALTH CARE PROVISION 4
client rights and responsibilities by developing a channel for feedback and complaints (Pauly,
McCall, Browne, Parker, & Mollison, 2015). In that case, quality assurance processes and
feedback avenues will be put to use.
Part Two
The Need
It is factual that health care and the systems call for commitment to cultural competency
which has been greatly by culture and some changes to the medical system as a whole. In that
regard, health systems are on the verge of adopting comprehensive tailored strategies that would
help address the needs linked to cultural, health literacy, and linguistic barriers (Gower, Duggan,
Dantas, & Boldy, 2019). First, there exists a series of guidelines that dictate or encourage
responsiveness when it comes to health systems so as to cater for the growing diversity.
Additionally, increasing cultural safety in health care calls for organizational guided
goals and policies, these would be central to reducing both linguistic and administrative barriers
to care provision. Policies that seek to boost cultural safety in a given organization ought to fix
issues across the various levels, from the top management to billing, and administrative
departments.
Up to the present age, health-related studies underperform in terms of offering cultural
integrated and linguistic tied aid to sufficiently address cultural, health literacy, and linguistic
barriers (Kruk et al., 2018). Health practitioners such as the nurses are well placed to facilitate
the link between patient culture, health literacy, and language in a bid to better health results for
culturally diverse populations.

CULTURAL SAFETY IN HEALTH CARE PROVISION 5
Implementation
Training Approaches
Ideally, staff training is a key move that would ensure cultural competency is achieved.
The training approaches that are almost wholly focused on boosting knowledge on various
groupings based on common health tied beliefs and behaviors are great starting points for health
professional training (Zelalem, Janette, Tinashe, & Jane, 2017, pp. 6-7). In line with that aspect,
training will be conducted in three sessions; the first and the second sessions would be centered
towards operational bias and championing for sound relationships in the medical workforce and
the third will almost entirely place focus on cultural safety. In that light, feedback from the
training participants will be helpful in developing a cultural safety training package doctored to
meet the needs of the diverse patient population.
Given that it is difficult to know almost everything about a particular culture, pieces of
training will have to focus on limited key facts. As a whole, the training would be geared
towards making sure medical practitioners are sufficiently equipped with tools deemed necessary
to pinpoint and resolve cultural, health literacy, and linguistic barriers (Kaplan & Kates, 2017).
Additionally, the training will help to improve attitudinal behaviors that might be negatively
impacting medical outcomes.
Translation and Bilingual Services
Traditionally, health centers were known to be highly developed in terms of linguistic
capabilities. The idea behind bilingual training has resurfaced. For instance, the Torres Strait
Islander were known to be best served by bilingual and bicultural trained practitioners. In that
case, effectiveness will be achieved through trained and licensed health professional who will be

CULTURAL SAFETY IN HEALTH CARE PROVISION 6
responsible for interpretations whilst providing a cultural understanding about a patient’s beliefs
and practices (Sam, 2010, p. 7). Generally, the interpreters would act as bridges between the
complicated health care world and the community. In terms of expenses, the cost of failing to
deal with language barriers is even greater as compared to the cost of hiring an interpreter. This
is due to the fact that barriers in communication can greatly compromise the provision of health
care services.
Cultural Competence is a learning Venture
The quest for a tailored action plan will not be an easy venture. Despite having outlined
different avenues for success through; nourishing staff capacity, personnel training, and
employing the use of interpreters among others; establishment of culturally safe health care is not
easy (Garneau & Pepin, 2015). In that regard, these action plans have to be standardized for ease
and consistency of applicability which is the hardest part. Notably, cultural safety is a continuous
process rather than an immediate achievement.
As a result, progress monitoring will be vital towards establishing whether the plan is on
course to greatness. This will be done by integration of data collection tied to cultural safety into
monitoring plans that are already in place. These include client experience questionnaires and
counseling therapies (Pauly et al., 2015). These moves would be key to the evaluation of whether
the action plan on cultural safety worked.
In conclusion, the action plan highlights the fact that cultural safety is a key element in
the overall excellence as far as medical delivery is concerned. The community and the health
care system as a whole are overly concerned with cultural, health literacy, and linguistic barriers.

CULTURAL SAFETY IN HEALTH CARE PROVISION 7
In that regard, efforts to boost cultural safety (such as the ones outlined in this action plan) would
positively impact health care provision for the population.
References

CULTURAL SAFETY IN HEALTH CARE PROVISION 8
Garneau, A. B., & Pepin, J. (2015). Cultural Competence: A Constructivist Definition. Journal
of Transcultural Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1177/1043659614541294
Gower, S., Duggan, R., Dantas, J. A. R., & Boldy, D. (2019). One Year On: Cultural
Competence of Australian Nursing Students Following International Service-Learning.
Journal of Nursing Education. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20190103-04
Hayden, G., & Jalla, C. (2015). Communicating for quality and safety in Aboriginal health care.
In Communicating quality and safety in health care.
Henderson, S., Horne, M., Hills, R., & Kendall, E. (2018). Cultural competence in healthcare in
the community: A concept analysis. Health and Social Care in the Community.
Kaplan, N., & Kates, S. L. (2017). Quality and safety. In Proximal Femur Fractures: An
Evidence-Based Approach to Evaluation and Management. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-
319-64904-7_13
Kruk, M. E., Gage, A. D., Arsenault, C., Jordan, K., Leslie, H. H., Roder-DeWan, S., … Pate, M.
(2018). High-quality health systems in the Sustainable Development Goals era: time for a
revolution. The Lancet Global Health. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2214-109x(18)30386-3
Parnell, T. A. (2018). Role of Culture, Language, and Communication Access Services. In
Health Literacy in Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1891/9780826161734.0007
Pauly, B. (Bernie), McCall, J., Browne, A. J., Parker, J., & Mollison, A. (2015). Toward Cultural
Safety. Advances in Nursing Science.
Sam, B. (2010). Health Care Interpreters- Vital Partners in Patient Care. Diversit-e: Australia's
Diversity Health e-magazine, 7-8.

CULTURAL SAFETY IN HEALTH CARE PROVISION 9
Zelalem, M., Janette, P., Tinashe, D., & Jane, U. (2017). Refugee and Migrant Women's
Engagement with Sexual and Reproductive Health Care in Australia: A Socio-ecological
Analysis of Health Care Professional Perspectives. Plos One, 6-9.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0181421