California Senate Bill 32

• However, since the training program was launched, Indigenous leaders and health professionals have said it fails to improve cultural safety and poses safety risks to Indigenous Peoples.
• Legislating individuals and systems to shift behaviours and attitudes is useless without well-developed cultural safety programs developed and delivered by Indigenous Peoples.

Cultural safety

• In April, we organized a round table on cultural safety alongside Indigenous scholars, patient partners and other community members in Montréal.
• The educational strategies that underlie the awareness training are insufficient to countering racism and fostering cultural safety.
• Cultural safety promotes an approach to foster change that moves away from simply learning about a culture.
• Scholars propose a conception of cultural safety as a systemic approach to health-care transformation, one that goes beyond individual training but engages organizations and society as a whole towards the principles of cultural safety, equity, social justice and decolonization.
• As such, comprehensive Indigenous cultural safety training programs should explicitly integrate notions of power, privilege, colonialism and racism.
• However, cultural safety privileges the autonomy and self-determination of Indigenous Peoples in relation to their health services, and as such, promotes their empowerment.
• Cultural safety is aligned with principles that promote empowerment and rely on values such as respect, equity and reciprocity.