Inclusivity in health care
Taking steps and overcoming barriers to achieve a diverse work force.
Sports teams need to be well-rounded to win championships. Orchestras require proficiency in all instruments to earn a standing ovation. If superior patient care is the crux of hospital medicine, then a multifaceted workforce is essential. It provides the varying perspectives, experiences, and approaches that best serve a heterogenous patient population.
In Saturday’s session, “Building and Retaining a Diverse Workforce for the Future of Medicine,” Kimberly Manning, MD, will discuss the hallmarks of a diversified personnel, ways to identify, cultivate, and keep employees, and common barriers to success.
Without a diverse workforce, both patients and clinicians lose out on true comprehensive care — either receiving it or providing it. Within a diverse workforce, health care workers can work together to develop equitable approaches, expand their education, and form inclusive programs and processes. This should be a tenet of health care, or “a shared mission,” said Dr. Manning, professor of medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine, at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta.
The first step to building a motley labor pool, Dr. Manning said, is for individuals and institutions to recognize that diversity benefits everyone and impacts every health outcome.
“[A diverse workforce] informs our questions, drives our policies, mitigates the impact of our biases, and affords our patients better care,” she said. “My life lens is expanded by working with colleagues and trainees from different backgrounds. I can directly apply these things to my patients through culturally humble and humanistic care.”
Recent controversy surrounding organizational diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) guidelines and hiring practices has made things more challenging, said Dr. Manning. Additionally, when a group doesn’t prioritize DEI in its goals or budgets, it sends a message to its employees and patients that it’s not important.
“As a person underrepresented in medicine, I know that individuals are drawn to places where they won't be the ‘lonely only’,” she said. “For geographic locations that are already challenged by less diversity in the population, it can be hard to attract and keep those from underrepresented groups.”
Dr. Manning said marginalization often leads employees to experience isolation, burnout, or even resignation. This can occur at any level, she said, including management.
“The old adage, ‘You can't be what you can't see,’ applies even in the high achieving spaces where hospitalists work,” said Dr. Manning. “If you've never seen a division director or [executive] from a historically excluded group, it's hard to imagine that as attainable.”
Objective job opportunities, equal pay, and transparency are all critical to achieving community, affinity, and stability among a diverse workforce.
“Anyone who is committed to taking exceptional care of human beings and who wants our families and future generations to have access to safe, patient-centered, evidence-based health care should care about this,” Dr. Manning said.
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