Cultural Safety In Health And Social Care Essay

As stated in the book “Working Together: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mental Health and Wellbeing Principals and Practices.

Cultural Safety is about acting in ways to enhance rather than diminish individual and communal cultural identities. Cultural safety promotes individual and community wellbeing which has respect and understanding and acceptance. Cultural Safety also focus on Cultural competence which covers and recognises the importance of culture, ethnicity, and racism. Cultural competence defines as knowledge and having awareness and skills aimed at providing a service that promotes awareness and how important it is to ensure that you show understanding.

As stated in ‘Cultural Connections for Learning, culturally safe practises

is aimed to recognise and show respect of others and to safely meet their needs and expectations and importantly rights they are entitled too. The important principal of cultural safety is that it doesn’t ask people to focus on cultural dimensions of any culture other than their own, instead cultural safety is primary about examining our own identities and attitudes and being open minded towards other people cultures and beliefs and not judging them. Being able to put aside our own beliefs and not because what we believe is any less as important than that of others but because we are here to provide a service to a client we need to put their needs first on a professional level.
Cultural safety in work place is ensuring the environment is safe for people of different cultures where there is no assault, no challenges and all fellow workers and clients will feel invited and respected and there is a shared knowledge and experience. It’s learning together and working together, it gives people the power to comment on care, leading to reinforcement of positive experiences. It also enables them to be involved in changes in any service experienced as negative and changing this to a positive.
Listed below are some strategies that enhance the ability to be culturally safe include,
• Reflecting
• Communication
• Trust
• Open Minded
• Educating
• Respect
• Identifying
• Understanding

Cultural safety is well beyond cultural awareness and cultural sensitivity, it is ensuring you are supporting and able to carry out culturally significant tasks as part of service delivery, it’s about working together to ensure that a mutual respect is met.
The importance of understanding our own culture, and how it can influence the way we think, feel and behave is much harder. However, in the increasingly multicultural environments in which we all live and work, the importance of being culturally safe in what we do and endure we do it well.