Cultural safety in hospitals: validating an empirical measurement tool to capture the Aboriginal patient experience.

ConclusionThe Cultural Safety Survey Scale could be a useful tool for measuring cultural safety in hospitals from the Aboriginal patient perspective.What is known about the topic?There are increasing calls by governments around the world for health institutions to enhance the cultural safety of their services as one way of removing access barriers and increasing health equity. However, currently there are no critical indicators or systematic methods of measuring cultural safety from the patient perspective.What does this paper add?The cultural safety scale, an Australian first, presents the first empirically validated tool that measures cultural safety from the Aboriginal patient perspective.What are the implications for practitioners?This measurement model will allow hospitals to measure the cultural safety of their services and ascertain whether current efforts aimed to improve cultural safety are resulting in Aboriginal patients reporting more culturally safe experiences. Over time it is hoped that the tool will be used to benchmark performance and eventually be adopted as a performance measure for hospitals across New South Wales. PMID: 32213274 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Australian Health Review - Category: Hospital Management Authors: Tags: Aust Health Rev Source Type: research