Did you know that the global healthcare industry market size is valued at USD 21,222.5 billion in 2023, and projected to reach USD 44,760.73 billion by 2032, growing at a CAGR of 9.07%? This shows how significant is the role of healthcare in the whole world.
Regardless of growth, the healthcare industry is lagging in maintaining inclusivity. It should be the ideal way of making patients feel cared for and valued. While some hospitals can still hire professionals with an emphasis on diversity, but they can build their culture around it.
However, it can still be a significant way for healthcare organizations to do better under diverse leadership. Still not sure about it? In this article, we will explore about healthcare organizations and specifically the ways to promote positive outcomes for patients.
Let’s learn in depth!
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Prioritizing a broad spectrum of backgrounds and perspectives within health care improves patient outcomes.
- Implementing a diverse selection of healthcare professionals can ensure patient care and balance.
- It also improves cultural awareness, so that professionals will be more able to empathize with the patients.
- Doctors and other healthcare specialists work as the leaders within the system, so they can influence the entire workforce accordingly.
- There are widespread cultural, economic, ethnicity, and more issues that the system has to deal with.
Diversity Defined
To begin with, let’s briefly take a look at what it signifies to prioritize diversity in leadership, or more importantly, possibly, what it doesn’t mean. Cultural diversity initiatives have never been about forfeiting quality in favor of quotas, often a phrase that gets thrown together by opponents of what we’ll, for lack of better terminology, describe as DEI initiatives.
Diversity is primarily about prioritizing a broad spectrum of backgrounds and perspectives within one organization. It’s not referring to choosing less qualified individuals, but more about recognizing that qualifications can take multiple forms.
People occupying leadership positions need to have all the required credentials and skills – that’s a given. No one might have ever suggested, at least in a very serious capacity, straying from those core requirements.
But focusing on diversity also recognizes that healthcare systems frequently serve a wide range of people. Sometimes caring for loved ones who come from many different cultural backgrounds can be challenging. There are cultural or interpersonal gaps that can seriously disrupt patient treatment strategies.
Implementing a diverse selection of professionals at every possible level of healthcare leadership ensures that patient care considerations are balanced and broad-based. And about concentrating on people’s skin color over qualifications, as critics so often like to claim. It’s fundamentally about recognizing that there are countless different types of important contributions that a leader can make to a healthcare organization.
Improved Cultural Awareness
What is cultural awareness in healthcare? It can describe a couple of different things. First, there’s cultural awareness within the healthcare unit. In other words, a common recognition that coworkers have for one another. How inclusive is this healthcare organization from the inside? Are people whose background falls outside the majority group welcomed and well-considered?
There’s also cultural consciousness on the external side: how the organization is prepared to address the needs of patients. Here’s a suggestion that is a little harder to track because, at least in a stated way, healthcare is completely culturally equitable. This is to emphasize that no hospital in the United States has any protocols in place that would specifically or intentionally discriminate when treating an individual based on their religious, racial, or cultural background.
You might think, okay, then why are health outcomes much more variable for minorities than they are for individual members of the majority? Well, there are a variety of reasons for that, not all of them cultural.
One, for instance, is that minorities commonly have lower incomes than almost all group members. This reveals that they’re less likely to be insured. It also means that they are substantially less likely to have consistent access to preventive care.
The other factors are a bit harder to mentally prepare for and typically fall under the category of cultural considerations.
It’s an officially recognized medical fact that patient communications between the majority and minority groups in healthcare establishments are often fractured and unsuccessful.
It’s not that there are discriminating doctors who take minority patients less seriously on purpose. Not only that, but it’s often more than they simply don’t fully understand where the minority patients are coming from. Organizations that lack cultural competency are undeserving of their patients. They don’t mean to, but it is what happens.
INTERESTING FACT
“The healthcare industry is one of the world’s enormous and highest-growth industries that consumes over 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).”
How Inclusive Leadership Makes a Difference
So, how does hiring people from a broad range of different ethnic backgrounds fix the problem? Well, typically, this happens in very organic ways. A well-rounded leadership structure equips the entire workforce with a wider range of perspectives.
The majority group doctors and administrators are undoubtedly still present, but their perspective is balanced by participants from other backgrounds. Over time, the entire organization gradually becomes better at meeting the preferences of minority groups.
Through osmosis? No. Through gradual and consistent effort. Communication protocols improve. Cultural appreciation spreads as doctors and nurses become more aware of the fact that their previous communication experiences with minorities weren’t perfect. They make a substantially more concerted effort to do right by everyone they treat.
Is That All There Is?
So is that the secret to restoring healthcare? More diversity? Not specifically. Well-rounded staff address precisely one of the many problems that influence all people who are experiencing Western healthcare.
There are still widespread issues that create racial healthcare effectiveness disparities and also negatively impact the way the population at large experiences healthcare.
Hospital shortages, issues with prohibitive pricing, insurance companies, and infrastructure issues, for example, are often understated in the issue of finding healthcare in rural communities. Here, where patient demographics traditionally skew heavily in the primary group direction, outcomes are still distorted. In this case, not because of subconscious bias, but because of basic accessibility issues.
Low-income patients face a physically inadequate infrastructure in rural communities where there are typically high proportions of people earning poverty-level wages. There’s also more distance to consider, and there are fewer resources. One hospital might serve five counties, which illustrates that patients who have little in the way of personal resources to kick off with might sometimes need to find out how to travel forty or fifty miles for routine care.
That’s a drawback that equity, diversity, and inclusion can’t directly address. But it is nonetheless essential to keep in mind that even small changes made at the cultural or infrastructural level can have a wide impact. It’s not just that equitable representation within healthcare leadership ranks improves outcomes for minority patients. It’s that it helps strengthen comprehensive healthcare systems. That’s beneficial for everyone.
Ans: It refers to the presence of a wide range of different backgrounds, identities, and perspectives within leadership teams and organizations.
Ans: Inclusive leadership focuses on fostering a more effective and compassionate care environment to improve patient outcomes.
Ans: The knowledge, sense of care, and understanding of healthcare professionals regarding the diverse cultural backgrounds of patients is known as cultural awareness in healthcare.
Ans: Not necessarily, diversity can create a great positive impact on healthcare practice outcomes, but it may not be suitable for all healthcare disparities.
