“It’s about Rights”: The Bunya Project’s Indigenous Australian Voices on Health Care Curricula and Practice

Abstract

Indigenous community-controlled health care organizations provide timely, sustained, and culturally safe care. However, their expertise is often excluded from health professional education. This limits the transfer of knowledges and protocols to future practitioners—those positioned to shape health care systems and practices that could achieve the health rights of Indigenous people and reduce health and social inequities. In Australia, despite national government commitments to transforming curricula, services, and systems related to Indigenous health, health care training organizations such as universities generally have low numbers of Indigenous staff and few strategies to engage Indigenous experts. The authors of this paper are part of the Bunya Project, an Indigenous-led participatory action research effort designed to support non-Indigenous university staff and curriculum development through partnerships with Indigenous community-controlled organizations. We conducted 24 interviews with Indigenous individuals to ascertain recommendations for health care curricula. Three themes emerged: (1) role-modeling and leadership of Indigenous-controlled health organizations; (2) specific learnings for health professionals; and (3) achieving human rights in practice. Interviews also highlighted the need for health professionals’ extension beyond clinical caregiving, and staff and students’ development of knowledge, skills, and actions regarding client self-determination in order to promote clients’ rights across all aspects of their health care. Critical self-reflection by health professionals is a foundational individual-level skill necessary for cultural safety.