Cultural Safety and the Provision of Humanitarian Nursing in Haiti

Abstract

Nurses comprise the largest segment of the global health workforce including in humanitarian settings. Guided by strict ethical to address issues of global health inequities, nurses are currently limited in their ability to address root causes of inequities as the most commonly used nursing concepts and theories are informed by racist and colonist ideologies. To address this gap, this study was guided by critical race theory and cultural safety to explore how nurses’ worldviews, with explicit attention to race, influence care in the humanitarian setting. The study focused on care delivered in Haiti taking into account its history with the United States (U.S.) and number of U.S. volunteers working there at any given time. The qualitative inquiry included in-depth one-on-one interviews with U.S. nurses and analysis of blog posts. The findings of this study add to decolonizing discourse with which to inform nursing education in cultural theorizing and subsequently nursing practice in the humanitarian setting