The responsibilities in education go far beyond the delivering of content and assisting students to acquire knowledge, it includes creating safe environments, adapting to our student's needs, helping shape how they learn, think, reflect, and enquire. As educators we have the responsibility to continue to grow and learn alongside our students and peers. 

In my time at UNSW, I have had the great pleasure of working with our Indigenous Health Education Unit (IHEU) on a number of projects, and more recently in reviewing and developing our Indigenous Australian maternal health content in MFAC1521 (BGDA). The IHEU has worked extensively to produce a range of learning activities and resources. They continually demonstrate a passionate dedication to providing our students with the knowledge they need to be able to support the health of our Indigenous population.

My role in supporting their work has involved the development of curricular activities to help students develop an understanding of what cultural safety encompasses, understand its importance, its impact to health outcomes, and provide a scaffold for their steps towards implementing it. It has also involved mentoring our facilitators and enhancing their confidence to create a safe space for students to discuss and develop their understanding. 

Ensuring the culturally safe environment for our students and staff at all times is critically important and can be challenging to foster as students explore their understanding of complex issues. The strength and resilience of the IHEU must be acknowledged when recognizing students not developing adequate culturally safe understanding, to rapidly redevelop their planned curricular to adapt to the students' needs.

The next part I put in not as an achievement, but to highlight the necessity for us as individuals, but also as those that are trying to shape the future generations, that what we do, and what we say, has an impact. That as educators we need to understand our power and seek ways in which it can be used to support those around us. It is with great regret that it became apparent that there were students who did not understand stereotypes, that put both students at staff at in cultural harm. This necessitated the urgent need to address with the students' the concepts of privilege and power, and how it can either be used in a harmful way, or to be an ally or to be a future advocate for patients, and work towards enhancing their ability to create safe environments for their peers and educators. 

To address this I, in collaboration with peers from the IHEU, Program Authorities from UNSW Medicine, and Faculty well-being officer, developed a special lecture for our year 1 students with a panel of invited speakers. The aims were to ensure students understood stereotypes and racism, understand the direct impacts of these on those around them, and start to reflect on their own positions of power and privilege, and how they can be utilized in aiding their patients. This session held personally, an enormous sense of responsibility, to support my peers in the IHEU, shape our students' own reflections, and use my own position of power and privilege in the right way. I feel it was best summed up in the words of one of our Program Authorities, after the lecture when I was emailed the comments "I really appreciate your honesty, bravery, leadership, and concern for students and staff." 

I am happy to report that the further activities in this course on Indigenous maternal health were embraced by students and the hard work to implement a strengths-based curriculum by the IHEU was evident in a drastic increase in their exam responses. This hopefully demonstrates a good start towards creating future doctors who will be Ally's and advocates to their patients.