Beyond 2020: Addressing racism through transformative Indigenous health and cultural safety education

The 2020 International Year of the Nurse and Midwife has harshly revealed the need to increase the nursing and midwifery workforce and for the disciplines to invest in anti‐racism initiatives. The World Health Organization (WHO) (2020) has called for a marked increase in the numbers of nurses and midwives, academics and students. However, to ensure the cultural safety of patients and staff, WHO (2020) stated this increase in workforce must include clinicians and educators from underrepresented populations, in particular Indigenous populations. Stemming from our experiences as First Nations nurses, midwives, practitioners, researchers, educators and allies, this editorial outlines our agenda to reform Indigenous health and cultural safety curricula in Australian higher education institutions.This year has revealed stark inequities in the response to COVID‐19, with Indigenous Peoples disproportionally affected across the globe (Pilecco et al., 2020; Power, Wilson, et al., 2020). In Australia, as elsewhere, there has also been a huge public response to the international Black Lives Matter protests. The Black Lives Matter movement condemns Black deaths in custody and the entrenched systematic racism that allows it to continue. In Australia, it resonated with the Aboriginal deaths in custody movement and prompted a call for action among Australian nursing and midwifery leaders to transform curricula to ensure the workforce had the necessary skills, knowledge and attributes to address systematic racism (Geia et al., 2020) and through this action address one of the greatest barriers to increasing the numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives (West, 2012).