Healthcare Assignment: Reflection On Cultural Safety & Health of Aboriginals & Torres Strait Islanders

Question

Task: Task description
To successfully complete this assessment task, you will write a reflective essay about the importance of becoming a culturally safe health professional.
In the healthcare assignment you will draw on the concepts of cultural safety, self-determination and collaboration to explain why it is important to:
1. Have ongoing learning and reflection on your own cultural beliefs, values and attitudes, and the influence these may have on providing health care with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
2. Provide culturally safe and responsive health care for and with your Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients and their families
3. Advocate for health service delivery that ensures health for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
You will draw on academic literature, research data, and three responses to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health-related stories you will write during your teaching intensives. Your essay will be informed by the central concepts within this unit: cultural safety, self-determination and collaboration.

Answer

Introduction to the context of healthcare assignment
It is of utmost importance that native and ethic wellbeing disparities are eliminated to create a well-balanced health care system. This should be achieved by focusing on existing organized bigotry, and ensuring a healthcare infrastructure which treats people in an impartial manner (Curtis et al., 2019). These days a lot of importance is provided to social skill and social security in the field of health care. This is both at an individual level of a practitioner as well as for organisations so that medical care can be provided impartially. Working successfully with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander individuals is significant for expanding the adequacy of a medical care association between and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients and a wellbeing proficient. Being an Indian national taking up healthcare services, my own country values have a deep embedded feeling towards such a situation. While growing up, I have seen a lot of apathy and bureaucratic negligence towards the poor and under priviledged in my country and had always felt that it is essential for the national healthcare infrastructure to be stronger and provide an empathetic yet fair treatment to the under priviledged, this reflective essay shall discuss how my own values and cultural background helps me build a notion about providing appropriate culturally safe and sound healthcare treatment to Aboriginal and Torres strait islander people. It shall also discuss how culturally safe, self-determined and collaborative healthcare practices can be done and informed.

Discussion
The concept of cultural safety stands for practices and policies which respects cultural and social differences existing in society for minority groups or underprivileged such that they get fair provision of healthcare and other facilities (HealthInfoNet.ecu.edu.au, 2021). Nevertheless, it not only means being aware of the social and cultural differences and acting accordingly. By being culturally safe also means providing an environment, which could stand for individual practitioners or even workplace policies and code of conduct where all are treated fairly and with respect. In my opinion, the term ‘Cultural safety’ corresponds to identifying as well as respecting the boundaries with providing appropriate clinical access for the minority groups despite the inadequacies of the system existing between the patient who is supposed to get access to the health care infrastructure and the provider of the same. This hence also means that cultural safety should exist by understanding the underlying culture of people, their values and traditions so that they can be appreciated. All things being equal, cultural safety tries to accomplish better deliberation through supervising merit, removing racism, reconsidering policies by government, carrying out intellectual exercises, and by providing the person to decide how culturally safe is the medic environment (Victoria State Government, n.d.). Cultural safety requires wellbeing professionals to introspect and if needed alter their approach of practice through good collaborations. This means for me that I require to be a wellbeing supplier who scrutinizes his own predilections, evaluations, assumptions, overviews and preconceptions that might be adding as a deterrent to providing a suitable nature of medical care for such patients. This stands not just for me but for my peers too. In my opinion for maintaining cultural safety with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, I should focus more on usage of empathy, patience, appropriate collaboration with their groups or societies working closely with them while understanding their inhibitions and restrictions and acting with appropriate professional competence.

To create a culturally safe workplace means to create an environment where the professionals have more empathy towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people, one where there is no racism or discrimination. Since this is an ongoing problem faced across sectors, hence a phased organizational change is more welcome to tackle this issue such that optimal health is achieved for these people as well as health and safety outcomes (Wilson et al., 2020). Cultural safety in my opinion is to be reflected more through individual practices like also self-determination. Through self-determination and appropriate collaboration, a healthcare professional can make appropriate decisions to promote health and wellbeing for such people. An organization can help through training development and exposure programmes to inform the health acre professional and through mix and match of theory and practices improve the implementation of such practices. Self-determination as part of practice should be done at an individual level through conscious practicing of cultural safety when dealing with such groups. Establishing rapport and connections with individuals from such groups can be equally benefitting both the health care practitioner and the community as it aids in establishing trust. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people groups have a solid and rich history as the most established societies on the planet, exhibiting strength, tirelessness and flexibility. There is an unsatisfactory gap in expectancy of life among Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, with Aboriginal people having a gap of 8.6 and 7.8years from non-Aboriginal Australians, and recent study shows that this gap has not limited itself even now (Wilson et al., 2020). Australian Aboriginal individuals additionally experience a fundamentally higher weight of ongoing sickness than general population of Australia including higher rate of diabetes and kidney infection. This startingly indication of infections, diseases and lower life expectancy are all connected to more ill-fated social factors of welfare, partial practices, as well as radical and historic minimization. In my opinion, this is the primary reason why people belonging to Aboriginal and Torres strait Islander groups are so much hesitant to access freely available healthcare infrastructure. It is hence upon the medical practitioners themselves that they are able to present a cultural safe and competent health care which is accessible to them with such feelings through self-determination, strong collaboration and communication with such groups and coordinate while being focused on their welfare. Given this, further developing Aboriginal people groups service commitment through, in addition to other things, upgraded social ability of wellbeing experts and administrations is a significant component of tending to these discriminatory wellbeing results. This is similar to how people from minority groups even in India face even today. This is why I feel more sympathetic and self-determined towards providing a fair treatment and make way for access of good healthcare for this segment of people here in Australia.

An assemblage of published research exists that gives direction to wellbeing experts concerning how to function with Aboriginal individuals (Wilson et al., 2020). A large portion of this entails detailed research on rules, existing standards, moral standards and recommendations of practices that ought to be followed by health care practitioners which is enlightening, specifically related to collaboration. Researchers feature the need to work in association, be adaptable, form connections, get to realize Aboriginal individuals and think of their places of advantage. Projects often grow the needed networks to report that shared trust and respect are wanted to attain reinforced wellbeing variation in Aboriginal people group (Curtis et al., 2019). In any case, the research normally does not give substantial instances of how-to activity these wide standards, especially according to cooperating in multifaceted groups in Aboriginal wellbeing. Along these lines, in spite of this collection of proof, inadmissible differences in wellbeing results and medical services access among Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians endure (Wilson et al., 2020). This exhibits that there is as still existing missing data currently comprehensible for wellbeing experts working in Aboriginal wellbeing field. In my opinion, practioners, organisations and infrastructural frameworks and bodies managing them should be more engrossed with appropriate informing tactics for better social outreach. Basic awareness is need of the hour. This will definitely challenge their current mannerisms of functioning instead of relying more on the cultural differences so that both can be fit together. The goal of cultural safety implementations furthermore should be clearly linked to completing the value it is meant to have for such groups. Maybe as anyone might expect, the idea of social wellbeing is frequently seriously standing up to and trying for wellbeing establishments, experts, and understudies than that of social skill. Notwithstanding, it has become progressively certain that wellbeing professionals, medical care associations and wellbeing frameworks all should be occupied with running after social security and basic awareness (Curtis et al., 2019).

Shockingly, administrative and instructive wellbeing associations have would in general casing their comprehension of social capability towards individualized rather than authoritative/foundational processes, and on the securing of social information rather than intelligent self-appraisal of force, privilege and predispositions. There are various motivations behind why this methodology can be hurtful and sabotage progress on lessening wellbeing disparities. Individual-level centered positionings for social capability sustain a course of othering, that distinguishes those that are believed to be not quite the same as oneself or the prevailing society (Curtis et al., 2019). The ramifications for people who experience othering incorporate distance, minimization, diminished freedoms, disguised mistreatment, and prohibition. To encourage protected and viable medical services associations, people with significant influence should effectively look to expose othering rehearses.

Conclusion
By dismissing the hierarchical/foundational drivers of medical care disparities, individual-level centered positionings for social capability are fundamentally restricted in their capacity to effect on wellbeing imbalances. Medical services associations impact wellbeing supplier inclination through the construction of the medical care climate, including variables, for example, their obligation to labor force preparing, responsibility for value, working environment stressors, and variety in labor force and administration. Pursuing social wellbeing ought not be considered to be a mediation simply at the level of the wellbeing proficient albeit a fundamentally cognizant and sympathetic wellbeing proficient is unquestionably significant. The proof obviously underlines the significant job that medical services associations (and society overall) can have in the making of socially safe conditions. Social wellbeing drives thusly should target both individual wellbeing experts and wellbeing proficient associations to intercede emphatically towards accomplishing wellbeing value.

References
Curtis, E., Jones, R., Tipene-Leach, D., Walker, C., Loring, B., Paine, S.-J., & Reid, P. (2019). Why cultural safety rather than cultural competency is required to achieve health equity: a literature review and recommended definition. International Journal for Equity in Health, 18(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-019-1082-3
HealthInfoNet.ecu.edu.au. (2021). Cultural Safety for Health Professionals - Health Professionals. Healthcare assignment Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet. https://healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au/key-resources/health-professionals/cultural-safety-for-health-professionals/
Victoria State Government. (n.d.). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural safety framework Cultural safety continuum reflective tool For the Victorian health, human and community services sector Acknowledgement of Aboriginal peoples in Victoria. Retrieved November 18, 2021, from https://www.dhhs.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/202004/Part%202-Aboriginal%20and%20Torres%20Strait%20Islander%20cultural%20safety%20framework-Cultural%20safety%20continuum%20reflective%20tool-20190620.pdf
Wilson, A. M., Kelly, J., Jones, M., O’Donnell, K., Wilson, S., Tonkin, E., & Magarey, A. (2020). Working together in Aboriginal health: a framework to guide health professional practice. BMC Health Services Research, 20(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-020-05462-5