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Why is a Maori nursing workforce important to improving Maori health? Simply, culture counts! Our beliefs and values are informed by our world views that influence how we come to know, understand and experience concepts like health and wellbeing. The people nurses care for come with diverse world views. Neglecting this difference can mean the efficacy of working with people from another culture becomes compromised.
Despite nurses in education and clinical practice "knowing" and articulating the importance of including a person's culture in their health care, and its impact on their health outcomes, there is an apparent insistence on delivering universal one-size-fits-all approaches that privilege dominant cultural views and realities. For the vast majority of people nurses work with this may be satisfactory, but we know it is not necessarily working for most Maori and their whanau. They experience persistent inequities when accessing health services, and they receive poorer quality health care, including that delivered by nurses.
Despite the holistic, caring rhetoric that underpins nursing practice, this is not the reality experienced by many Maori and their whanau. Research with Maori and their...