What is Cultural Safety and How does it Contribute to Healthcare?
1.What do you understand by cultural safety and cultural competence?
2.What forms of anti-racism could you pursue in your professional work with Aboriginal people? Give specific examples.
3.Why is thorough evaluation so important for improving the way we work with Aboriginal communities?
4.What are the most significant insights and understandings that you have gained from doing this course.
The term cultural safety is a conceptual framework and it was developed in an indigenous healthcare setting and has been dealt in the broader context relating to culturally diverse healthcare. The motivation behind the development of cultural safety is that it addresses the colonial processes and the structures that mould and cast and in addition impinge o the health of the Maori community. Cultural safety is used in both the Canadian and the Australian contexts. The aim of cultural safety is to elaborately address the impact of colonial invasion and dominance within the healthcare system by emphasizing on the health system the degree of cultural safety that is felt by the individuals those who seek the heath care service. The onus is to identify and safeguard the integrity of the person and their cultural identity. The thrust is on the assisting the health workers in understanding about the processes that goes into the formation of identity and culture. Another thrust is to intervene into the power imbalances and the relationships that are found to be culturally unsafe. The cultural safety model is concerned with the culture specific beliefs as against encouraging the health workers to be more concerned with their work and being historically, socially and politically aware about the multiple factors hat impinge and impact on health. The cultural safety training places the safety of the health worker to the foreground through a recognition of the uniqueness of their culture, identity and the way it manifests in the practises. The cultural safety model is concerned with the systematic as well as the individual transformation that is brought with the aim of examining the influence of on the care provided to the indigenous population (Downing, Kowal and Paradies 2011).
The notion of cultural competence is concerned was popularized by Terry Cross’s cultural competency continuum and has been widely used in the context of USA, Australia and various other countries. Cultural competencies has other definitions that are concerned with establishing congruent behaviours , policies and compatible attitudes. The core value regarding the training of cultural competency is concerned with improving the health awareness of the health workers a long with their knowledge and skills. This is done with the intention of managing cultural factors that are in conjunction with the health service interventions. Cultural competence places the individual and the knowledge of the individual at opposite ends of the spectrum. Of late there has been an increasing focus on the self awareness and reflexivity of the health workers.
What is Cultural Competence and its Core Values?
2.The term anti-racism embodies the social movement along with the set of practises and the discourses the objective of which is to deal with the entire spectrum of the patterns and the sites that is represented by racism. According to scholars, it is the confrontation, eradication and amelioration of racism. The anti-racism framework is subsumed within the specific strategy situated within the broader spectrum of the anti-oppression practises (Corneau and Stergiopoulos 2012). The thrust of this conceptual framework is to emphasize on the anti-oppression practises by unveiling the hierarchy and power dynamics that are embedded in the everyday relationships (microcosm) and the social institutions (macrocosm). Along with the complications of whiteness as it interacts with the axis of class oppression and privilege. There is an emphasis on establishing the intersectionality and the areas of dangers of categorization. The cultural awareness training and the diversity training are two important tools that needs to adopted in promoting the values and principles of anti-racism. Training in anti-racism training can also be useful considering the kind of transformation it si intended to being in the psyche of the person (Price, McCoy and Mafi 2012). I would be aware about the white privilege that have trained in the anti-racism training. I would strictly avoid essentialism that leads to the stereotyping of the ethnic minorities that are usually the negative stereotypes. Another way of incorporating anti-racism with the aboriginal population is through the adoption of the Foucauldian model. A group of participants can be encouraged to be reflexive about the the different norms relating to anti-racism and identify the knowledge that is connected with the subjectivity of the person. Along with the anti-racism training, it is important to explore and ascertain the white privilege and its influence on the non-white racial minorities. Adoption of the anti-oppression framework as the mode of knowledge can lead to the policies and the strategies (Kowal, Franklin and Paradies 2013). As a profession social worker I need to engage in the critical self-examination and the critical self-knowledge that are pertinent to debunk the dominant system that perpetuates hierarch, it is not just at the individual level but also at the institutional level changes are required. In the training course of anti-racism, there are certain factors that aids in engendering anti-racism. This includes conducting a training session with asset of participants and enquiring them regarding the possible reason that pushes the individual Australians to endure extreme level of suffering especially in the domain of health and the social problems (Pedersen, Walker, Paradies and Guerin 2011). It has been found that the anti-racists are not comfortable in linking indigenous agency with the social problems of the indigenous population
How to Pursue Anti-racism in Professional Work with Aboriginal People?
3.The role of evaluation and evidence essay an important role in the political framing. There are relevant complexities in the evaluation process. The political dimension of evaluation discusses about the important questions relating to diversity and the contradictory political reference points that are to be succeeded (Altman and Russell 2012). From the perspective or standpoint of Gillard Government, intervention has been important in managing to transform the discourse and incorporate it to the human rights. However, it has been found that political success has its own set of ambiguities. Studies have shown that the attempt to examine and measure process and politics of success in the context of intervention is quite controversial. Another challenge pertaining to this is it is open to different kinds of interventions. Evaluation ahs found that that the indigenous population in Australia do not behave like other people and do not share the same aspirations like their non-white counterparts. It ahs been noted that the aboriginal people who are residing in the remote regions of Australia are considered as the embodiment of creation that render meanings to everything. The Dreaming reference is concerned with the customary laws, rules and regulations of the indigenous population. It is sated that too much of evaluation has taken place in a short span of time (Markiewicz 2012). The Australian government has been found to be the fulcrum of national reform of the indigenous community as well as the intervention strategies for the indigenous population.
Evaluation has enabled in understanding about the importance of the reflexive practises that entail adaptability that can be applied more effectively to assist with the progression off the evaluations. Evaluations are specially important when it emerges from the insider as the person is considered to be having more knowledge about the community. When evaluations emerges from outside the community, such evaluations are believed too be leading disempowerment of the people of the community. It reveals the long history of disengagement of the community and are interested in asking the local people the range of issues that want to be addressed. Successful and refined evaluations aid in devising strategies that would benefit the entire community. It needs to be kept in mind that evaluations emerging from the inside of the community and the evaluations of the outsider of the community can be quite different. It can be difficult to develop a framework of indigenous evaluation right across Australia because of the local contexts and the local cultures
Role of Thorough Evaluation in Improving Work with Aboriginal Communities
This course has been significant in intervening into the plight of the indigenes population in Australia and the various challenges faced by them. I leant about white privilege and white supremacy that operates to impinge upon the lives of the indigenous population in Australia. It has been argued by scholars that race-cognizant protects are meant to advance the working of different people belonging to different races. The highlight of the race-cognizant process is that it differs from the project and practises. Of the cultural sensitivity and the cultural awareness programmes. There are certain behaviours of the people that reinforce white privilege that can be manifested in the form of colour blindness of no recognizing the privilege that is accrued due to the culture of white privilege. I learnt about the post-apology era that made me reflect about the critical whiteness theory and its contribution to the formulation of the race cognizant social work practise. These theories provide the teachers as well as the students to reflect on the white privilege and the white values that dominate the Australian society (Lynn 2001). In addition, these values permeate into the discourse of professional social work practise. There have been discussions on making social theory relevant and the development of the theory of indigenousness and the theory of indigenous practise. The thrust has been on local knowledge being weaved into the mainstream with the aim of makings social work culturally significant and its application in he multiple contexts. An indigenization of the mainstream worldview is the need of the hour though a colonialist and an assimilationist perspective would be appropriate in countering the status quoist position perpetuated by the white race theories and white privilege (Young and Zubrzycki 2011). There have been emergence of the Aboriginal knowledge and the distinctive worldviews compatible with this kind of knowledge. Whilst the debate regarding the most appropriate worldview, it needs to be stated that critical whiteness perspective is pertinent as it emphasizes on the development of the Australian Indigenous social work. The social work curriculum is infused with the cross-cultural perspective that includes the multicultural pedagogy that ahs been presented above and it has certain merits in terms of teaching. I have learnt that indigenous social work needs to be incorporated as a mode of theory. Race cognizance is found to be relied on the ability of the practitioners and their willingness to confront the political and the social histories and through the adoption of practical change
References
Altman, J and Russell, S. (2012). Too much “Dreaming’: Evaluations of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Intervention 2007-2012. Evidence Base. Issue 3.
Corneau, S. and Stergiopoulos, V. (2012). More than being against it: Anti-racism and anti-oppression in mental health services. Transcultural Psychiatry. 49 (2): 261-282.
Downing, R., Kowal, E. and Paradies, Y. (2011). Indigenous cultural training for health workers in Australia. International Journal of Quality in Health Care. 23 (3): 247-257.
Kowal, E., Franklin, H. and Paradies, Y. (2013). Reflexive antiracism: A novel approach to diversity training. Ethnicities. 13 (3): 316-337.
Lynn, R. (2001). Learning from a ‘Murri Way’. British Journal of Social Work. 31 (6): 903-916.
Markiewicz, A. (2012). Closing the gap through respect, relevance, reciprocity and responsibility: Issues in the evaluation of programs for Indigenous communities in Australia. Evaluation Journal of Australasia, 12 (1): 19-25.
Pedersen, A.; Walker, I.; Paradies, Y. and Guerin, B. (2011). How to Cook Rice: A Review of Ingredients for Teaching anti-Prejudice. Australian Psychologist. 46 (1): 55-63.
Price, M., McCoy, B and Mafi, S. (2012). Progressing the dialogue about a framework for Aboriginal evaluations: Sharing methods and key learnings. Evaluation Journal of Australasia, 12 (1): 32-37.
Young, S. and Zubrzycki, J. (2011). Educating Australian social workers in the post-Apology era: The potential offered by a ‘Whiteness’ lens. Journal of Social Work. 11 (2): 159-173.