Embedding cultural safety in nursing education: A scoping review of strategies and approaches

Introduction

Post-secondary institutions can no longer ignore calls to action. Nursing programs are responsible for addressing racism and discrimination by integrating cultural safety into baccalaureate nursing curricula. This scoping review of peer-reviewed literature will reveal how cultural safety is integrated into nursing education across North American post-secondary institutions.

Materials and methods

57 records met the criteria for this scoping review between the dates of January 2016 to July 2024. The database search was conducted from November 7, 2021, to November 9, 2021, and then updated on September 17, 2024, to include articles up to and including July 2024, yielding 3444 total search results (1448 from Medline; 1996 from CINAHL). Results were manually screened, and duplicates found were removed.

Results

The articles were analyzed thematically to identify strategies for integrating cultural safety into undergraduate nursing education. Four main themes were identified: experiential, theoretical, analytical, and multimodal learning.

Conclusion

This scoping review highlights nurse educators' role in fostering cultural safety and the importance of considering multiple strategies in curricular development. Strategies include practice experiences, simulations, storytelling, and case-based learning. To provide safe nursing care, education must be inclusive and responsive to people of all races, genders, abilities, and sexual orientations. By applying the concept of cultural safety to nursing education, students are required to acknowledge bias and address issues of power, colonialism, racism, and discrimination that exist in healthcare. These findings provide a foundation for future, more focused research. Further studies could expand on this work by evaluating the effectiveness of specific pedagogical strategies and exploring ways to better support nurse educators in promoting culturally safe learning environments.