Cultural Safety: Reflection on Personal Values, Beliefs, and Behaviors in Healthcare Practice

Running head: Cultural Safety 1
Cultural Safety
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Cultural Safety 2
Behaviours
Compassion
Attentive
Communication skills
Punctual
Beliefs
Traditional medicine
Faith
Culture
Mentors
Values
Consistency
Health
Education
Integrity
Me

Cultural Safety 3
Introduction
Personal values, beliefs and behaviours have a significant effect on the
quality of healthcare services offered by healthcare providers because
both the patient and nurses have different values, beliefs and behaviours.
Studies have indicated that values, beliefs and behaviours have a strong
impact on one’s judgement regarding every aspect in life including
careers (Friedman, 2012). Healthcare providers can easily be biased while
providing healthcare services to patients with contrasting culture, thus
necessitating the need for thorough reflection on the personal values,
beliefs, and behaviours on the side of the healthcare providers (Friedman,
2012). The provision of biased healthcare services weakens the nurse-
patient relationship which is critical for effective service. The patients’ lose
confidence in the nurses and as a result, they do not open up during
diagnosis causing the nurses to offer treatment without adequate
information (Smye, Josewski, & Kendall, 2010). A proper reflection on the
source of bias or cultural differences is significant in ensuring that there is
cultural safety in my clinical practice. This paper is a reflection on my
personal values, beliefs and behaviours and how they can foster or
undermine from being a culturally safe professional in a multicultural
healthcare environment
Values
Consistency
Consistency in the treatment of all patients regardless of their cultural
differences or my cultural inclination in one of my personal values.
Consistency in character is at all times is important. This ensures that
there is no bias and thus fostering a culturally safe professional
environment (Hall et al., 2015). My communication skills such as body
language or the use of physical touch (Kourkouta, & Papathanasiou, 2014)
across all patients would show consistency and support culturally safe
practice.