A University of Newcastle (UoN) researcher will lead a national project aimed at improving healthcare experiences for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, after securing more than $620,000 in federal government funding.
Dr Elissa Elvidge, from the Hunter Medical Research Institute (HMRI), has been awarded $621,000 through the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) Early to Mid-Career Researchers Grant scheme to trial a new tool designed to measure cultural safety in health services.
Known as the Cultural Safety Scale (CSS2), the project will test an approach to collecting feedback directly from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients about their experiences in healthcare settings.
The national trial comes as researchers highlight a gap in Australia’s healthcare system.
While culturally safe care is a national requirement, there is currently no standarised way to measure whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients feel it when accessing health services.
Researchers say culturally unsafe experiences can create barriers to healthcare, contributing to inequitable health outcomes for Indigenous Australians.
The Cultural Safety Scale aims to provide health services with a systematic way to identify strengths, target areas for improvement, support service reforms and track progress over time.
It will bring together Indigenous health groups, Aboriginal community-controlled organisations, health authorities, healthcare providers, digital platform experts and community partners to develop a national platform that can be used across a range of health services.
The platform is intended to support benchmarking between services and provide evidence to guide future reforms aimed at improving culturally safe care.
Dr Elvidge’s research focuses on the intersection of public health policy and health systems, with an emphasis on conducting research through community partnerships.
The project, titled Cultural Safety in the Australian Health System: Empirical assessment of Indigenous patient experience as a basis for meaningful service reform, is expected to help establish cultural safety as a measurable indicator of health service performance.
If successul, researchers hope the trial will provide health services across Australia with a consistent way to monitor Indigenous patient expeeiences and improve healthcare delivery based on community feedback.
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