BRINGING HEALTH INTO CULTURE – NOT CULTURE INTO HEALTH CULTURE AND COMPETENCE – REMOTE ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT

BRINGING HEALTH INTO CULTURE, NOT CULTURE INTO HEALTH ….not just the physical well-being of an individual but refers to the social, emotional and cultural well-being of the whole Community in which each individual is able to achieve their full potential as a human being, thereby bringing about the total well-being of their Community. [...] (NACCHO) Health care services should strive to achieve the state where every individual is able to achieve their full potential as a human being and this bring about the total well-being of their community.” CULT COMPETENCE Cultural competence is more than cultural awareness—it is the set of behaviours, attitudes, and policies that come together to enable a system, agency, or professionals to work. [...] • Developing and embedding cultural competence in health services requires a sustained focus on knowledge, awareness, behaviour, skills and attitudes at all levels of service, including at the operational or administrative service level, health practitioner level, practitioner-patient level and student-training level. [...] If patients never come to your service, especially where there is no alternative – there will be a negative clinical outcome…… Limitations of cultural competence largely fall into three categories: • lack of clarity around how the concept of culture is used in medicine, • inadequate recognition of the “culture of medicine” and • the scarcity of outcomes based research that provides evidence of eff. [...] In addition, the concept of candidacy, which proposes that peoples’ eligibility to access healthcare services is the product of negotiation between individuals and health services may not apply in this context, given the tenuous relationships that we identified between some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and Western models of health service provision.