Decolonising Healthcare Through Curricula: Integrating Indigenous Knowledges and Person‐Centred Practice Through the Integrated Indigenous and Person‐Centred Practice Theory and Framework
Roianne West, Brendan McCormack, Tamara Power, Reakeeta Smallwood, Tonia Crawford, Andrea McCloughenABSTRACT
Aim and Design
Indigenous knowledge systems offer enduring, relational and strengths‐based frameworks for health and wellbeing. This theory and framework paper critically analyses how colonial legacies embedded in nursing curricula marginalise Indigenous knowledges and perpetuate inequities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We argue that current approaches, often fragmented, tokenistic and additive in nature, fail to address the structural and pedagogical roots of unsafe cultural practices and institutional racism in nursing education.
Results
In response, we present the Integrated Indigenous and Person‐centred Practice Theory (IIPPT) and the associated Curriculum Framework (IIPCF) as a transformative, decolonising and Indigenising approach to nursing education.
Methods
The IIPPT and IIPCF were developed through sustained collaborative critical inquiry between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous academics with a focus on developing an integrated curriculum, supported by institutional structures and processes and community‐accountable practice, rather than solely abstract theorising. Grounded in Indigenous Standpoint Theory, Freirean pedagogy, Ramsden's theory of Cultural Safety and person‐centred theory, the IIPPT situates relational accountability, cultural humility and Indigenous self‐determination at the heart of nursing professional identity formation. The IIPCF operationalises these principles across curriculum design, pedagogy, faculty responsibilities and systems‐level governance. Drawing on decolonising pedagogy, this work reconstitutes McCormack and McCance's Person‐centred Practice Framework through Indigenous self‐determination, Cultural Safety and relational accountability. It repositions nursing as a culturally and politically situated discipline, and nursing education as a key site through which Indigenous self‐determination, person‐centred practice and culturally safe care can be enacted.
Conclusion
We conclude by calling for Indigenous leadership and governance and a radical re‐imagining of nursing education accountable to Country, community and historical truths. This paper offers a theoretical and pedagogical blueprint for nursing curriculum reform that advances education and health equity and the right to self‐determined education by and with First Nations peoples.