Senior nurses' perceptions of cultural safety in an acute clinical practice area

Cultural safety is a concept that emerged within the New Zealand nursing context. The purpose is to ensure that nursing practice is congruent with the aims and objectives of the Treaty of Waitangi (the founding document between Maori and the Crown) and so facilitates the nursing of patients regardful of all that makes them unique and individual. While cultural safety has continued to develop since its inception in the 1980s, there remains relatively little research looking at its application in practice. This is due in part to the core element that recognises that only the recipient of care can determine if cultural safety has occurred. There are inherent difficulties in questioning patients about the quality of their care from a cultural safety perspective. One of these is the uncertainty around the public perception and understanding of cultural safety together with the implications of asking a vulnerable group to comment on this aspect of care. An alternative to asking patients to comment on whether they received culturally safe care is to consider the perceptions of health care professionals regarding this concept. This paper presents the results of a small study aimed at eliciting the beliefs and attitudes of a group of senior nurses with respect to the concept of cultural safety, and their perception of its role in clinical practice. It was undertaken as a preliminary to a wider survey.