Culturally safe and responsive care considers factors such as language, treatment preferences, accessibility, and religious, societal and cultural traditions in the provision of cancer care services. The delivery of culturally safe and responsive care ensures consumers, including their carers and families, have access to appropriate supports throughout their cancer journey and enables equity in cancer outcomes.

This action identifies the need to evaluate and extend cultural safety training programs to all cancer service providers. Various culturally safe training programs currently exist across the health system. These programs may include modules on culturally safe language and terminology, impacts of individual differences in shaping care experiences, needs and accessibility barriers for certain populations and resources to build health professional and service provider capacity and confidence to provide culturally safe, trauma-aware, healing-informed care.

This action identifies the importance of evaluating the effectiveness, accuracy, comprehensiveness, and accessibility of current cultural safety training programs. The ongoing monitoring and evaluation of cultural safety training programs will support the expansion of high-quality cultural safety training programs. This may include strategies to monitor training outcomes, such as consumer experience indicators and the quality of supportive care.

Community input and engagement with advocacy organisations, local community groups, and peak bodies should be considered in development and expansion of cultural safety training programs to ensure input of priority population groups on the content, effectiveness and breadth of the cultural safety information pertaining to their treatment and experiences when accessing cancer care services. The outcomes of ongoing monitoring and evaluation of cultural safety programs could inform which programs are expanded across cancer services and to cancer care providers.

When extending cultural safety training programs to cancer service providers, consideration should be given to the delivery of programs by priority population members and co-design or revision of content through community-based partnerships and engagement with priority population groups.

Implementation of this action for priority population groups could consider:

• co-designing cultural safety training programs with priority population groups with lived experience of cancer and healthcare providers that work with priority population groups, with particular considerations of intersectionality
• engaging with consumers, including their carers and families from priority population groups to evaluate cultural safety training programs through community partnerships, regular engagement, and accessible feedback procedures
• ensuring priority population representation in the leadership and governance of cultural safety training programs.