Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Recommendation 23(iii) of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (2015) calls on all levels of government to provide "cultural competency training for all healthcare professionals" (p.164). This includes mental health professionals, like counselling psychologists. Cultural competency and safety training is important because when individuals and communities struggle with the impacts of historical trauma, they will enlist support from counselling professionals from outside their communities (Kirmayer et al., 2007; Baum, 2016; CMA, 2015). However, currently, counsellors may be unable to provide meaningful, culturally safe support. This is because we do not know if and to what extent cultural safety education has been integrated into the Western postsecondary curriculum for counselling psychologists. Cultural safety is a relational concept with potential to bridge cross-cultural communication and transform relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Answering the TRC (2015) call to action, this paper recommends an evaluation framework and methods to assess the effectiveness of the current counselling psychology curriculum to support culturally safe practice. Adopting Two-Eyed Seeing as an evaluation framework, Western and Indigenous methods can work together to assess the impact of cultural safety curriculum on negotiating power at the intrapersonal, interpersonal and contextual levels (Browne et al., 2016).