Is Canada's Post-Graduate Medical Education Curricula Producing Physicians who can Provide Culturally Safe Care?

Abstract

Indigenous peoples living in Canada experience significant health inequities relative to non-Indigenous people, which stem largely from experiences of colonization, past and present. An important contributor to such inequities is the paucity of culturally safe healthcare available to Indigenous people. A lack of relevant educational experiences for healthcare professionals has been implicated in both creating culturally unsafe healthcare environments and in perpetuating these healthcare-related inequities (Guerra & Kurtz, 2017). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC, 2015) calls for improved cultural safety training for healthcare professionals treating Indigenous patients. Recently, post-graduate medical education training programs have shifted to a competency-based model (CBME) whereby specific learning objectives must be attained to graduate, compared to the historical time-based model (Iobst et al., 2010). However, it is unknown whether the CBME programs sufficiently fulfill the TRC calls to action pertaining to Indigenous health. The objective of this study is to determine the extent to which Canada’s CBME curricula provide cultural safety training regarding Indigenous health. An environmental scan of the publically available national CBME curricula will assess the content of the core portions of the training programs. A self-report mixed-methods survey will be distributed to medical residents at Queen’s University to determine the extent to which they perceive that such training is provided to them. This research aims to identify gaps in the CBME curricula pertaining to Indigenous health, so as to contribute to improved cultural safety training, and thus health equity, in the future.