Abstract
There is an increasing body of literature that considers the relevance and experiences of cultural competency and safety training in health professional students. However, less is written about Australian tertiary learners’ experiences of engaging with cultural competency training. The aim of this study is to explore tertiary students’ willingness or resistance to cultural competency and safety pedagogy. Qualitative student feedback to a teaching unit was collected and triangulated with data from focus groups with tutors. Results were thematically analyzed. Willingness and resistance to cultural competency and safety teaching emerged as two key themes. Willingness to engage with the unit was largely due to student interest in the content, teaching environment and relevance of cultural competency to students’ future practice. Resistance was linked to the students feeling personally attacked, or culturally confronted, with tutors noting the topics around sexuality and white privilege being more resisted. Acknowledging reasons for student resistance and developing strategies to reduce resistance can facilitate more student engagement with cultural competency topics, ultimately leading to their future provision of culturally competent healthcare.
Highlights
Increasing population diversity creates challenges and opportunities for health professionals to care for culturally and linguistically diverse patients
The aim of this study is to explore students’ engagement with cultural competency and safety pedagogy in the Culture Diversity and Health (CDH) unit, using student and tutor perspectives on the learning and teaching experiences
Preconceived themes of willingness and resistance to cultural competency and safety teaching and learning emerged as key themes from the Student Feedback on the Unit (SFU), Student Feedback on Teaching (SFT) and focus group data (Table 1)
Summary
Increasing population diversity creates challenges and opportunities for health professionals to care for culturally and linguistically diverse patients. Research indicates that poorer health outcomes may result if sociocultural differences between patients and health professionals are not reconciled [1,2,3]. Widespread racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare have been an impetus for the promotion of cultural competence in health settings [4]. Cultural competence is a key strategy to provide quality care that meets the social, cultural and linguistic needs of diverse patients [1]. The goal of cultural competence in healthcare is to create health systems and workforce that can deliver quality care to patients regardless of race, ethnicity, culture or language proficiency [1]. Cultural competence has been widely written about and defined [5], and most definitions are a combination of
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
