Indigenous Culture and Health in UDRH Research: An Indigenous-Led Narrative Review.
Michael Watkins, Colleen Kelly, Charmaine Green and 4 others
PMID 41968965WHAT IT FOUND
Cultural safety was central in rural and remote Indigenous health papers, but community engagement and feedback were often missing.
Clinicians should ask how care can be community-led, culturally grounded, and reported back to Indigenous patients and families.
Key findings
01Forty papers were initially classified as Indigenous culture and health; after seven exclusions, 33 papers were analysed.
02In the 33 analysed papers, 18 (54%) did not report engagement with Indigenous peoples and 23 (70%) did not report feedback of findings to communities.
03The most commonly considered cultural domain was working with community (27 papers), followed by concept of health (24), cultural practices (22) and identity (10); traditional healing and data sovereignty were each considered in one paper.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
It is a narrative review, not a systematic review or randomised trial, so it cannot establish that a treatment or care model works. It only looked at papers coded as Indigenous culture and health from rural and remote health centre author lists, so relevant work may have been missed. Many included studies did not report engagement with Indigenous peoples or feedback to communities, so the cultural safety picture is incomplete. Each paper was read as a stand-alone publication, which may miss ongoing community relationships and work not written up. The quality appraisal tool was not applied consistently across all studies, so study quality was not formally graded.
Declared interests
The authors report nothing to disclose.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that a particular culturally safe care model improves patient outcomes. It is a narrative review of mostly descriptive studies, and many did not report how Indigenous peoples were engaged or how findings were fed back.