Day 18: Tuesday 10 April (7pm, Ayr)
Most of today was a pretty typical workday: 6am morning walk; 7am breakfast; 8.30am start work; 12pm lunch; 4pm discover snakeskin; 5pm finish work …
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| Looks unremarkable, but the scary bit is missing from this photo! |
Oh yes, we found a snakeskin sticking out of a small hole in the wall, which means the snake is somewhere IN THE BUILDING! (deep breath) With any luck, the suspicion that it belongs to a tree snake will be correct and it won’t kill us, but I don’t know what a tree snake is doing in a building so I’m not convinced! Perhaps I’ll work from the hotel tomorrow … nah, just joking … I’ll be fine, really … just that if something does happen, please, someone pass this blog on to Mum and Dad and let them know I love them!
On a serious note, I read an article today from a recent copy of the National Indigenous Times. It was about the promotion of cultural safety in health (slight twist on workplace safety for my HR peeps) and the links to combating racism. Basically, it’s not too hard to believe that medical employees over the years have displayed varying levels of empathy for indigenous patients seeking help, and vice versa for indigenous practitioners coming across patients who refused their attention. I guess there are lots of experiences I’ll be grateful for not having been through so there is no judgement being passed here, but the article was interesting reading.
In the 1980s, Irihapeti Ramsden a Maori student nurse asked why it was that they talked about legal safety, ethical safety, safety in clinical practices and a safe knowledge base, but nothing about cultural safety. She instigated a new movement in NZ and nowadays, the concepts of cultural safety including cultural awareness and competence are really well entrenched with standards, learning programs and complaint procedures. In the simplest terms, it is about treating everybody and their wellbeing as individuals and ensuring that people know they don’t have to accept unprofessional care. This sounds like minimal expectations to me, but with my private health cover, I’ve obviously and thankfully missed the experience of ‘care’ from a desensitised nurse and I’ve been able to request a female doctor when I’ve wanted one - otherwise the movement has struggled to take hold in Australia.
Like many things, promoting awareness may help to change the way individuals, indigenous or not, are cared for in Australia, but also may not. So next time I’m exposed to healthcare, I’ll be paying attention to the way the people around me are being cared for as well and I hope I get the opportunity to thank the carers for considering, understanding and acknowledging differences and treating people with respect as individuals.
I wasn't able to locate a web version of the original article without subscribing to the newspaper, but if you want to know more, most of it seems to have been adapted from the following link to the Medical Journal of Australia (Rosemary van den Berg is the author of both articles)
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