Cultural responsiveness

Overview

A culturally responsive approach to employment support requires an understanding of the diverse experiences, values and worldviews held by people with disability from diverse cultural backgrounds.  The approach requires a recognition of our own cultural position and a capacity to engage and respond to each person’s cultural framework, or ways of thinking and doing, in a person-centred way.¹ 

Cultural responsiveness is an important consideration when working with people from a range of cultural backgrounds including:

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities
• people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities, including people from refugee backgrounds.²

The approach recognises that different cultures, beliefs and knowledges are not always treated with equal respect or granted equal attention or credibility in society, policies and services. Trauma-informed practice [link to trauma-informed practice] can be an important complement to culturally responsive practice as a way to address the historical and current impact of unequal treatment and injustice.

The way that we think about supporting people from different cultural backgrounds has changed over time from basic awareness through to fully inclusive practice. Each of these terms represent different levels of approach and they build on each other: 

• cultural awareness – understanding that cultural differences exist
• cultural sensitivity – having knowledge of cultural differences
• cultural competency – being able to work effectively across cultures
• cultural safety – creating an environment where people feel genuinely safe and respected
• cultural responsiveness – being able to learn from and relate respectfully to people from your own and other cultures.³

The key difference in these terms is who decides whether services are working or not. With cultural sensitivity or competency, the focus is on what service providers do. With cultural responsiveness, whether a service is culturally safe or not is judged by each service user; the outcome of culturally safe services is the person feeling comfortable and secure accessing care or support.⁴

Key strategies for success

Culturally responsive approaches can vary depending on the cultural backgrounds of   the people we are working with. A number of strategies support culturally responsive practice including:

• using active listening, empathy and building genuine relationships to build respectful connections across cultures
• recognising, valuing and learning from cultural differences – for example in decision‑making 
• using different forms of communication, for example interpreters or kin, to support understanding
• using reflective practice.