HEAL

Across health systems, equity, diversity and inclusion may require varying degrees of resources based on a hospital’s leadership, staff resources, geography and demographics. Here are recommendations to engage the hospitals in your system.

The role of the physical environment in communication between health-care professionals and persons with communication problems is a neglected area. This study provides an overview of factors in the physical environment that play a role in communication during conversations between people who are communication vulnerable and health-care professionals.

This resource provide simple practices that health professionals can incorporate to develop skills around speaking respectfully about disability.

The purpose of this tool is to ensure equity by creating a lens through which each Healthy King County Coalition Workgroup better understands who is impacted by our policies and practices.

This toolkit provides step by step guides on how to create a strategic plan with diversity, equity, and inclusion in mind.

This article covers implicit bias on a basic level, noting its role in policies and patient care while beginning to look at ways to reduce implict bias.

This blog post offers an overview on how to assess your organization's DEI understanding so they can make a plan to move forward in the work. This organization also links to multiple resources on DEI training, including webinars, a resource library, and success stories.

This article presents challenges and offer recommendations for facilitating the process of eliminating health disparities and achieving health equity across diverse populations.

This toolkit focuses on training and education strategies and approaches to encourage cultural humility and overcome implicit bias.

This toolkit distills the elements of the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health and Health Care (National CLAS Standards) framework and is intended to help guide the efforts of HCOs to evaluate the implementation of the National CLAS Standards across four settings: ambulatory care, behavioral health, hospitals, and public health.

To support hospitals and health systems starting from different points on their journey to strengthen health equity, the AHA’s Institute for Diversity and Health Equity (IFDHE) is preparing four new guidance and resource toolkits to share evidence-based practices to inform organizational next steps. Look for additional IFDHE toolkits to be released throughout 2021.

Inequities in health care are widely noted, yielding poorer quality of care and reduced patient safety, and increased costs. The economic burden of racial health inequalities in the United States is estimated to be $230 billion dollars. Identifying disparities in health care and effectively intervening to mitigate the effect of these gaps is key to attainting a society of healthy communities, where all individuals reach their highest potential for health. Hospital and health systems may utilize a dashboard to provide health care leaders with the necessary information on their journey to advance health equity, diversity and inclusion. A basic level health equity, diversity and inclusion dashboard may include measures to model the American Hospital Association 123forEquity Pledge to include the following: race, ethnicity and language preference data collection, stratification and use, cultural competency training, diversity and inclusion in governance and leadership, and community partnerships.

Diversity, inclusion, cultural humility and health equity are imperative for health care organizations, as the U.S. demographic landscape continues to change and regulatory agencies continue to implement requirements to improve safety and quality, reduce health care disparities and create more affordable care for patients. This certificate program works to train leaders who can build a more robust diversity strategy in their health care community.

The AHA's Physician Alliance has developed resources to help clinicians address social determinants of health within a framework that maximizes their skills while helping organizations systematically approach these challenges.

This toolkit provides checklists to assess the organization's diversity (inclusing leadership), workforce diversity, and patient care while providing action steps to move toward being a more diverse organization. The toolkit also provides case studies of various hospitals who took initatives toward becoming more diverse and their outcomes.