Safe Health Care For BIPOC Means Less White Health Care Workers?
Culturally Safe: A Euphemism For Kind-With-Own-Kind Prejudice
The article below written by second time Woke Watch Canada contributor, Michael Melanson, is in response to the Mrinali Anchan’s CBC piece - More BIPOC nurses needed to ensure culturally safe health care, says First Nation nurse. Other than the headline and subheadline of this piece, Michael’s comments below are unedited.
"So by being recruited and trained in culturally-safe care, we're able to provide trauma-informed care."
A couple of terms need to be unpacked in that statement.
'Culturally-safe care' is an euphemism for kind-with-own-kind prejudice. The presumption is that an aboriginal patient's culture, for instance, is somehow threatened by being treated by a non-aboriginal person ('culture' equates to race in this usage). It is seldom explained how culture is threatened at a hospital, particularly a Canadian hospital where universal healthcare is a right and the staff is generally profoundly multicultural. A patient's cultural background is routinely ignored at a hospital because it isn't relevant at all to diagnosis and treatment.
In a multicultural society with publicly-funded healthcare, it isn't realistic or right to encourage anyone to expect to only be treated by people who look like them. For one, there is no way governments could staff hospitals without blind recruiting often from other countries. Secondly, it is unlikely that governments could afford to hire BIPOC staff in proportion to the ratio of BIPOC patients admitted to hospital, if they could even find enough BIPOC staff to match admissions. If multiculturalism is an aspect of contemporary liberalism, does the concept of cultural safety summarily destroy the value of multiculturalism? Could a doctor who immigrated from Algeria possibly provide culturally safe care to a patient from Pukatwagan? The working presumption has been that the Hippocratic Oath would guide immigrant doctors to treat any patient to the best of their ability.
'Trauma-informed care' is an ideologically loaded term. It is based on a presumption that any BIPOC person will have experienced some degree of trauma, ostensibly at the hands of white people usually in the forms of colonialism and racism. Being trauma-informed means being trained to assume any BIPOC person will have some degree of historic trauma adversely affecting their well-being. Trauma-informed is the application of critical race theory's division of humankind into victims and victimizers. Doctors and nurses are busy people and recently under increased pressure to deliver healthcare. It is enough for them to just provide medical care in as timely manner as possible. They probably don't have time to try and second-guess a patient's identification with history and navigate subjects that might clash with a patient's cultural mores. They're there to treat medical problems and not feelings.
If an aboriginal patient feels 'culturally unsafe' around a non-aboriginal doctor, can a non-aboriginal patient similarly feel unsafe around an aboriginal doctor? The notion of culturally safe anything is an attempt to validate bigotry for certain people and, in that respect, it is a profoundly illiberal idea.
The demand for culturally safe recruiting implies that hospitals with too many white people aren’t culturally safe for BIPOC patients. This amounts to making white people a pathological risk in themselves.
For more from this author - Mount Royal University, the Conceit of Genocide and the Condemnation of Canada
Excellent analogy!!