Tertiary health science students willingness or resistance to cultural competency and safety pedagogy

![CDATA[Introduction Population diversity creates opportunities and challenges for health professionals to care for diverse patients. Patient outcomes can be negatively impacted if sociocultural differences between patients and health professionals are not reconciled. Acknowledging this, many universities emphasise cultural competency and safety training in health professional courses. The Culture Diversity and Health (CDH) unit encourages allied health professional students to explore issues within their own identifiable cultural contexts and promotes active citizenship amongst students. The study explored students’ willingness and resistance to cultural competency training through students’ feedback to teaching in the unit and tutor focus groups. Methods 1529 students enrolled in the course between 2013 and 2020 provided Student Feedback on the Unit. Ten tutors who taught CDH during the same period provided their Student Feedback on Teaching (containing feedback from 1342 students) for textual analysis, and eight tutors participated in focus groups. Results Sub-themes for willingness included students’ perceptions of tutors, applicability of course content and students’ own lived experiences. Sub-themes for resistance included “attacking” dominant cultures, students feeling personally attacked and questioning the relevance of cultural competency and safety training. Discussion Willingness to engage with the unit was largely dependent on students’ interest in the content, a safe teaching environment and how much they value cultural competency training as relevant to their future practice. Students who felt culturally confronted illustrated the most resistance to CDH content, with tutors noting the topics around sexuality and white privilege being more resisted. Building trust between students and tutors and creating a spiral curriculum where students revisit diversity topics in later years of training are imperative. Acknowledging reasons for student resistance and developing strategies to reduce resistance, such as immersive learning experiences, can facilitate better student engagement with cultural competency, ultimately leading to the future provision of culturally competent healthcare.]]