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Cultural Safety and Social Inclusion

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Handbook of Social Inclusion

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Abstract

Cultural safety is an approach to healthcare delivery that was developed in New Zealand in the 1980s. Currently, cultural safety is the preferred approach in healthcare education and healthcare practice, in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, and is increasingly gaining attention in the USA. This chapter reviews the concepts of cultural safety and explores some of the complementary areas between cultural safety and social inclusion. Cultural safety and social inclusion both relate to health and human services professional practice, organizational settings, and policy concerns. Cultural safety has been more heavily focused within healthcare education and services while social inclusion has had a more expansive reach, with application at a societal level and across more domains, such as in housing, employment, community safety, and poverty. A key point of departure between cultural safety and social inclusion is the foundation of a decolonizing perspective in the cultural safety model. Cultural safety focuses on decolonizing healthcare practice and systems through critical self-reflection. This necessarily centers on the impacts of colonization on Indigenous populations with an understanding that learning from this frame develops a critical consciousness that enables culturally safe care and environments with an inclusive understanding of culture. Directions for future research and practice implications are discussed. To achieve health equity, working toward culturally safe social inclusion is proposed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology Department, Pennsylvania State University, Media, PA, USA

    Pauline B. Thompson

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  1. Pauline B. Thompson
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Correspondence to Pauline B. Thompson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Health Sciences, VinUniversity, Hanoi, Vietnam

    Pranee Liamputtong

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Thompson, P.B. (2022). Cultural Safety and Social Inclusion. In: Liamputtong, P. (eds) Handbook of Social Inclusion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89594-5_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89594-5_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-89593-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-89594-5

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