Whole of organisation approach

Critical Element

Cultural safety is the responsibility of the whole organisation, not just of practitioners. As asserted in the recently released National Principles for Child Safe Organisations (Commonwealth of Australia, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2021), applying cultural safety across all levels of the organisation is a way of addressing the racism and discrimination that still exists across the health and human service systems today, and that often leads to a reluctance on the part of Aboriginal people to seek help.

Adopting a whole of organisation approach to cultural safety requires consideration of the policies and focus of the service, the physical location and environment, management and governance systems, human resources, and organisational processes such as data collection. Cultural safety should be embedded into the organisation’s way of working and not be an add-on element of practice.

Implementation activities include:

• Conduct a cultural safety audit of organisation (governance, mission, management, staff, partnerships, service offerings/programs, information management/data collection) to identify any workplace deficiencies and/or gaps in services.
• Respond to audit findings by developing and implementing cultural safety action plans to address identified issues.
• Develop services that are known to be culturally safe and implement new services according to cultural safety guidelines.