[From Cultural Sensitivity to Cultural Safety: Transforming Nursing Practice in a Multicultural Society]

With the acceleration of both globalization and population mobility, healthcare settings have become increasingly culturally diverse, presenting nurses with more complex cross-cultural challenges. Although cultural sensitivity promotes understanding and respect for cultural differences, its emphasis on knowledge accumulation limits its effectiveness in addressing the power imbalances and structural inequalities embedded in healthcare interactions. In contrast, cultural safety underscores that quality of care should be defined by patients' subjective experiences and highlights the important influence of power relations, critical self-reflection, patient autonomy, and structural contexts on care quality. In this article, the author examines the theoretical transition from cultural sensitivity to cultural safety in the nursing profession and analyzes the implementation of cultural safety in clinical practice, nursing education, and healthcare systems and its related challenges. The results of literature synthesis and analysis show that cultural safety facilitates the reconstruction of nurse-patient relationships, strengthens patient participation and trust, and provides a vital approach to addressing health inequities in multicultural societies. In the Taiwanese context, the health concerns of diverse populations, which include new immigrants, migrant workers, and transgender individuals, underscore the practical and policy implications of cultural safety. Future efforts should continue to integrate cultural safety into nursing education, clinical practice, and institutional design to develop culturally appropriate care models grounded in local contexts to further enhance care quality and promote health equity.