The Need for Cultural Safety in Injury Prevention

Public health nurses are on the front line of injury prevention initiatives. However, within injury prevention interventions and research, issues pertaining to culture are often addressed through the employment of one of the three approaches: cultural competency, cultural appropriateness, and/or cultural sensitivity. When using these approaches, it is often suggested that it is only those who are the recipients of an intervention or the focus of research that "have" culture. The injury prevention designer's/provider's/researcher's own culture, as well as the ways in which it may influence the interventions or research, is typically rendered invisible. In this paper, we provide an overview and illustrations of the use of cultural competency, cultural appropriateness, and cultural sensitivity in injury prevention initiatives, as well as each approach's shortcomings. We then introduce cultural safety, an approach that has not yet gained traction in injury prevention but has had significant uptake within nursing in general, and argue that it has the potential to overcome many other approaches' shortcomings and thus may lead to more effective and socially just injury prevention initiatives.