RACP cultural safety standards

The Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) is committed to fostering a culturally-safe and competent College. We want to equip and educate the broader physician workforce to improve Indigenous health through its Indigenous Strategic Framework.

We are also committed to meeting the expectations of education providers, set by the Medical Council of New Zealand (MCNZ) and Australian Medication Council (AMC), to develop programs for doctors that reflect cultural safety. To support this work, the RACP has reviewed and updated an important aspect of its Professional Practice Framework (PPF).

The PPF describes ten domains of professional practice, each with a professional standard articulating what is expected of all graduates of the RACP’s training and of physicians participating in the RACP continuing professional development program. Of the ten domains, the cultural competence domain and the standard have been reviewed and updated to become the cultural safety domain and standard.

To ensure a culturally-safe process, it was decided that a workshop should be held to gain input from people with relevant Indigenous expertise from the outset, rather than seeking feedback in the final drafting stages. To progress this work, the College sought the involvement of the Leaders in Indigenous Medical Education (LIME) Network who assisted in providing a facilitator and four subject matter experts for the workshop, co-branded as an RACP and LIME event.

Of the four, two were from Aotearoa New Zealand and two were from Australia providing a good balance of input. There was also representation from the RACP’s Curriculum Advisory Group, internal College cultural advisors as well as relevant College staff.

The workshop agenda was co-developed with the LIME facilitator and included discussion of cultural competence and cultural safety, a review of the current standard and what should or shouldn’t be included in a revised standard. The outcomes of the workshop were that the PPF domain name should change from cultural competence to Cultural safety and College staff who attended the workshop would prepare a draft of a new Cultural safety standard to be supported by the MCNZ’s definition of cultural safety.

A draft standard was developed and sent to all workshop participants for review and the MCNZ definition of cultural safety has been adopted. The new standard was endorsed by both the College’s Māori Health and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health committees and approved by the College Education Committee.

The details of the new domain and standard can be found on the PPF webpage.

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^{Image credit: SafeWork NSW}