Health-care providers receive cultural safety training to better serve Indigenous patients

A new online course rooted in the concept of two-eyed seeing is teaching health-care providers about cultural safety so they can better serve Indigenous patients.

Two-eyed seeing, or etuaptmumk, is a worldview that brings together two perspectives at once — the lens of Indigenous knowledge and that of Western science.

The six modules will educate people about Mi'kmaw language, culture and geography, while examining how racism and colonialism have harmed Indigenous people seeking care. There will also be lessons on trauma-informed clinical practices.

"It is an important pathway that we're on right now," Sharon Rudderham told CBC Radio's Mainstreet. "You know, for years and years and years, Indigenous people really were invisible in the health-care setting."

She's the director of health transformation for Tajikeimɨk, a new Mi'kmaw health and wellness authority that officially launched earlier this year. Tajikeimɨk has partnered with Dalhousie University and the IWK Health Centre in Halifax to create the course.

"We've heard the stories and experienced the negative treatment … that Indigenous people face, or racism that they face when accessing mainstream health-care services," Rudderham said.

The new curriculum is called To Know Better is to Do Better:Translating Indigenous Knowledge to Health Practice. Right now, it's open to 375 staff from the IWK, Nova Scotia Health and Mi'kmaw community health settings, with the goal of rolling it out across the province. 

For years and years and years, Indigenous people really were invisible in the health-care setting.- Sharon Rudderham, Tajikeimɨk

For Rudderham, taking a two-eyed seeing approach to health care is about understanding healing and wellness beyond a clinical setting. 

"The teachings of Indigenous people are just as important," she said. 

"It's about finding balance and the approaches to deal with healing and wellness that are all-encompassing and just not physical, clinical approaches."

Shifting how health care is delivered

Margot Latimer, a professor and the Indigenous Health Chair in Nursing at Dalhousie University, said the course is meant to educate individual clinicians, but also shift how health care is delivered on a larger scale.

She pointed to the province's language line that gives patients access to an interpreter in one of 170 languages. 

"But the only language that is not in it is Mi'kmaw, the language of the First People here … when you talk about inequities and cultural safety as a first step, that should be the first language that's there," said Latimer, who is also one of co-leads on the project. 

The online course is self-directed and each module is about 45 minutes to an hour in length. Some modules are also facilitated by an instructor so participants can ask questions, said Latimer. 

"Some of the content, it's sensitive and we want to make sure that people understand and are supported as they learn the content," she said.

The course is a long time in the making. Rudderham and Latimer first started working together more than a decade ago.

"We all have to focus on breaking down those barriers and building relationships," Rudderham said.