How do I improve my cultural safety?

There are many ways to improve cultural safety, including:

Engage and learn

Deepen your understandings of colonialisation, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, racism, discrimination, and ‘whiteness’ (see suggestions below).

Critically reflect

Reflect on your interactions with young people and colleagues to identify personal strengths, weaknesses, biases, and assumptions, and then use the insights to improve practice. The following cultural safety resource offers some great quizzes and reflection tools.

Examples of reflective questions include:

What are my own cultural views on porn?
What assumptions, stereotypes, or biases do I hold about porn and different cultures?
How might my assumptions and biases impact how I engage with young people? How can I address these?
What power and privilege shape my views and experiences around porn?
What historical and social legacies affect and inform the care I provide around porn? How might these impact my engagement with young people, and how can I address this?

Explore cultural frameworks and models of health

Build your understanding of Māori and Pasifika models that offer holistic approaches to health issues, that are relevant and applicable to workplace porn and youth response (suggested models, frameworks, readings and videos in this resource).

Reflect on the diversity of staff in your team

Does it reflect the diversity of your local community? If not, what changes are needed to improve this?

Are people able to comfortably and safely discuss or carry out cultural practices at work?

Understand and learn more about the role of whānau within many cultures

Many cultures involve whānau in a young person’s care and wellbeing as an important and vital source of connection, strength, identity, and support.

Learn tips, tools and strategies to build your cultural safety skills

See Tips for practicing cultural safety for some great general reading resources, videos, and tips for practising cultural safety.

“Cultural safety requires healthcare professionals to acknowledge and address their own biases, attitudes, assumptions, stereotypes, prejudices, structures and characteristics that may affect the quality of care provided….It encompasses a critical consciousness where healthcare professionals engage in ongoing self-reflection and self-awareness and hold themselves accountable for providing culturally safe care, as defined by the patient and their communities…” (76)