Indigenous health care: advances in nursing practice : an introduction

The similarity of colonial experience and its aftermath, as it relates to the health of indigenous peoples and, in particular, inequities in health status, draws our attention to the need for nursing to engage with a critical social and political consciousness in all areas of practice. The concept of cultural safety is a means of fostering a critical political and social consciousness in nursing to create an opportunity for social transformation. Cultural safety provides direction for the development of sociopolitical insights about the disparate power relations within and beyond health care, and the historical and social processes that organise these relations. Importantly, it reminds us that individual health problems are located within the domains of historical and structural disadvantage that shape them, and requires us to unmask the ways in which racism and unequal power relations have resulted in marginalisation and poverty with its associated illnesses. (non-author abstract)