Checking Up on Healthcare Diversity

Where are you with healthcare diversity? Is your hospital or provider workplace hiring healthcare professionals who are representative of your patient demographic? Could a person who doesn't speak English, or who might have other cultural, physical, or emotional barriers, receive quality care at your facility?

And what about cultural competence in the healthcare setting? The subject crops up more these days because more healthcare professionals realize that terms such as "diversity" and "cultural competence" are not merely buzzwords but actionable strategies designed to improve outcomes.

 
As the nation becomes more diverse, so must the healthcare workforce. It's not a matter of political correctness. It's a matter of quality care. If you cannot communicate with a patient, put them at ease, and gain their confidence, your ability to help them is severely diminished.

A lot of this is common sense.

 
A recent report from in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, for example,found that professional on-site interpreters in the ED greatly improved patient?and physician?satisfaction, and likely has a positive impact on outcomes.

"The magnitude of the difference was striking: Patients who had professional in-person interpreters were four times more likely to be satisfied than patients who didn't," said Ann Bagchi, of Mathematica Policy Research in Princeton, NJ, the lead author of Examining Effectiveness of Medical Interpreters in Emergency Departments for Spanish-Speaking Patients with Limited English Proficiency: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial.

"The results were the same for physicians and nurses, which could be important for reducing staff burnout and errors. The improved quality of care can also reduce the likelihood that a patient will return to the ER for the same health problem," Bagchi said.

Of course!

Giving anxious patients and their families the means to communicate with hospital staff  and to be updated on conditions, wait times, and course of treatment can only be a positive—especially with longer waiting times in crowded ERs.

Nobody expects that every hospital in the nation should have readily available translators for every language on the planet. But if your hospital's patient mix contains a significant minority population that you know has limited English abilities, it makes sense to either hire translators or medical professionals who can communicate with that population.

Is your hospital doing this or moving in this direction? Or, have the slow economy and the scarcity of healthcare professionals deprioritized diversity? Finding qualified staff of any race, creed, ethnicity, or culture—regardless of the patient mix—is already tough enough for many healthcare providers, and that's assuming they have the budget to add staff in the first place.

There are some indications that—whatever the reason—healthcare providers are not prioritizing diversity. For example, a recent report from the American Hospital Association's Institute for Diversity in Health Management found that only 37% of organizations earmarked specific funds for diversity and cultural competency—on average, about $424,000 annually per organization. Most of that money went towards recruiting minority staff.

I suspect that most hospitals would like to diversify staff but are probably limited by the economy and the market. At some point in the next few years, however, as the nation's healthcare system stumbles towards outcomes-based medicine, healthcare diversity will be reprioritized.