Cultural Polycentricity: A Strengths-Based Approach to Diversity in Australian Aged Care

Australia is witnessing a transformative shift in its healthcare landscape, including in aged care services, as new migrants are recruited in ever greater numbers to meet the growing needs of an ageing population. However, unlike in other global contexts where a migrant workforce provides aged care services to a largely autochthonous ageing population, in Australia, a traditional country of immigration, older people are also very diverse. One in three older Australians were born overseas, with this diversity set to increase over coming decades as today’s superdiverse working-age population grows old.

To respond to the increasing complexities of this evolving terrain, this paper proposes ‘cultural polycentricity’ as a sociological concept that may be applied in service management and care practice to simultaneously address healthcare needs of diverse older people while supporting diverse care workers. Cultural polycentricity validates a plurality of ways of being, and of caregiving practices, and disrupts the cultural monocentricity and ‘Anglophone thinking’ that is codified in standardised care practices. This shift in perspective enables effective communication, collaborative problem-solving, and the cultivation of both supportive workplaces for care staff and culturally safe care for older migrants. Diversity, the inevitable outcome of decades of migration policy, defines the Australian experience. As such it should be integral to public policy, not treated as an additional 'problem' to solve. Operationalising cultural polycentricity fosters mutual understanding between patients and care providers. In a multicultural society, where individuals of various ethnic backgrounds age within a shared healthcare system, understanding and embracing cultural polycentricity goes beyond mere cultural sensitivity; it is a sociological imperative that recognises health as a socially and culturally constructed phenomenon.