Providing Care with Cultural Humility to Indigenous Peoples: Reflections of Nursing Students on Education

Introduction: In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation of Canada developed 94 actionable policy recommendations to acknowledge and rectify the legacy of the residential school system on Indigenous peoples. Action 24 requires all nursing schools in Canada to teach Indigenous health issues within the curriculum, including the history of residential schools, Aboriginal rights, and traditional Indigenous practices. In response, Canadian schools of nursing have started to incorporate more Indigenous health content within their curricula, but there is minimal literature that explores the implementation and effectiveness of this education.
Goals and Methods: Undergraduate second-year nursing students were asked to write a reflection after engaging with a video from Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and Indigenous health content within a nursing theory course in the Winter 2022 semester. Fifteen students were selected at random to undergo thematic analysis to reveal common themes. The objective of this exploration study was to identify students' understanding of Indigenous health issues after engaging with current Indigenous health content provided in the undergraduate nursing theory course and determine how students can be better prepared to provide care applying cultural humility.
Results: Two common themes were identified with their respective subthemes. Theme 1 included barriers Indigenous Canadians face when accessing Canadian healthcare services, while theme 2 focused on strategies that can be strengthened among nursing students when caring for Indigenous Canadians.
Conclusions: Analysis of nursing students’ learning is significant to determine the effectiveness of the education provided and can help tailor the future curriculum to better address student specific learning gaps. Findings revealed that students demonstrate an in-depth understanding of the various health inequities Indigenous populations experience when accessing the healthcare system, but also identified skills students must foster to provide care to Indigenous Peoples.