Increasing the diversity of health care providers can help dismantle these barriers some patients face when seeking care—and it can even contribute to a greater quality of care for all. Homogenous healthcare is dangerous — and it disproportionately affects some patients more than others.
Full Answer
Why does diversity in health care matter?
Diversity in health care matters. Diversity in health care isn’t about filling seats with mandated numbers. It’s about ensuring all backgrounds, beliefs, ethnicities, and perspectives are adequately represented in the medical field. It’s about providing the best possible care for a variety of patients by enlisting a variety of providers.
How do health disparities affect the quality of care?
When a homogenous workforce is tasked with caring for an extremely diverse array of patients, the quality of care can suffer. Health disparities affect segments of the population differently. Attitudes toward health care and treatment can vary among different populations.
What is the significance of racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare?
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF RACIAL AND ETHNIC DISPARITIES IN HEALTHCARE Racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare are important for a number of reasons. They pose significant moral and ethical dilemmas for the US healthcare system.
What are the effects of a lack of diversity in medicine?
And the lack of diversity in health care can have detrimental effects on patients. A lack of diversity in medicine proves troubling for patients seeking physicians who are knowledgeable about their specific needs. For example, consider the medical needs of a transgender patient.
What impact does diversity have on health disparities?
Racial/ethnic minority groups in the United States are at disproportionate risk of being uninsured, lacking access to care, and experiencing worse health outcomes from preventable and treatable conditions.
What are some of the critical issues related to healthcare diversity and disparities?
Many factors contribute to health disparities, including genetics, access to care, poor quality of care, community features (e.g., inadequate access to healthy foods, poverty, limited personal support systems and violence), environmental conditions (e.g., poor air quality), language barriers and health behaviors.
How does health disparity affect health care?
Health disparities lead to approximately $93 billion in excess medical care costs and $42 billion in lost productivity per year as well as economic losses due to premature deaths. For example, as of 2018, Latinx individuals are two-and-a-half times more likely to be uninsured than whites (19% vs. 7.5%).
What are health disparities and disparities in health care?
Health disparities are differences and/or gaps in the quality of health and healthcare across racial, ethnic, and socio-economic groups. It can also be understood as population-specific differences in the presence of disease, health outcomes, or access to healthcare.
How would the poor management of diversity affect health workers patients and the healthcare organization?
Risks of Lack of Diversity in Healthcare It has been demonstrated that, broadly speaking, people with diverse racial and ethnic identities have unfavorable social determinants of health such as a lack of access to high-quality education, housing, and food.
What is racial disparity in healthcare?
The Institute of Medicine defines disparities as “racial or ethnic differences in the quality of health care that are not due to access-related factors or clinical needs, preferences, and appropriateness of intervention.” Racial and ethnic minorities tend to receive poorer quality care compared with nonminorities, even ...
What are disparities of health and why are they important to address?
A “health disparity” refers to a higher burden of illness, injury, disability, or mortality experienced by one population group relative to another. A “health care disparity” typically refers to differences between groups in health insurance coverage, access to and use of care, and quality of care received.
How do you address disparities in healthcare?
ADDRESSING HEALTH CARE DISPARITIESRaising public and provider awareness of racial/ethnic disparities in care;Expanding health insurance coverage;Improving the capacity and number of providers in underserved communities; and.Increasing the knowledge base on causes and interventions to reduce disparities.
How can we fix racial disparity in healthcare?
Increase awareness of racial and ethnic disparities in health care among the general public. Strengthen patient-provider relationships in publicly funded health plans. Apply the same managed care protections to publicly funded HMO participants that apply to private HMO participants.
What are the 7 health disparities?
If a health outcome is seen to a greater or lesser extent between populations, there is disparity. Race or ethnicity, sex, sexual identity, age, disability, socioeconomic status, and geographic location all contribute to an individual's ability to achieve good health.
What is meant by health disparity?
Health disparities are preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health that are experienced by socially disadvantaged populations. 1. Despite significant progress in research, practice, and policy, disparities in youth health risk behaviors persist.
Which of the following is an example of a health disparity?
Examples of Health Disparities Health disparities can be related to sex (male/female), race or ethnicity, income, education, sexual orientation or geography.
How does diversity affect health care?
Increased diversity of the health care workforce can lead to improved satisfaction for racial and ethnic minority patients. Patients who are treated by physicians of their own racial or ethnic background are more likely to report receiving higher quality care.
What is diversity in healthcare?
Diversity in health care goes far beyond a language barrier. It’s about understanding the mindset of a patient within a larger context of culture, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and socioeconomic realities . When a homogenous workforce is tasked with caring for an extremely diverse array of patients, the quality of care can suffer.
Why is diversity important in medical field?
While research on sexual and gender orientation as well as religious affiliation among physicians is limited, diversity in these realms is also important for developing good bedside manner and providing quality care.
Why do doctors need global competence?
George’s University. "Doctors of today need a global competence to understand the diverse populations they serve. Global competence for diverse populations is exactly what medical schools need to provide for their students, who in turn will provide nuanced care for patients of all walks of life.”
What is the majority of medical students?
Additionally, the majority of medical students come from affluent, higher socioeconomic status backgrounds. According to An Updated Look at the Economic Diversity of U.S. Medical Students from the AAMC, more than 75 percent of medical students are from families who are in the top two quintiles for household income as identified by US census data.
How does diversity help in medical education?
In fact, diversity in medical education environments can improve learning outcomes for all students. Diverse classrooms help students improve active thinking, intellectual engagement, social skills, empathy, and racial understanding — all critical components to a physician's education.
What percentage of doctors are Christian?
Almost two-thirds of physicians and surgeons in the US identify as Christian, followed by 14 percent Jewish, seven percent unaffiliated, five percent Hindu, and three percent Muslim.
Which race is more likely to die from pregnancy related causes than white women?
These are just two of the staggering statistics: Black, American Indian and Alaska Native women are two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women. These disparities have “persisted over time,” despite the fact that most pregnancy-related deaths are preventable. 5.
What percentage of physicians are Asian?
In contrast, only 17 percent of physicians are Asian, 5.8 percent are Hispanic, five percent are Black, and 0.3 percent are American Indian or Alaska Native. 3. Unfortunately, these numbers aren’t likely to see a drastic change anytime soon.
What is cultural competence?
In the world of medicine, the term cultural competence refers to the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors required of a healthcare professional to provide optimal care and services to patients from a wide range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
What is the purpose of the collection of race, ethnicity, and language preference data for the hospital’s workforce assessments?
Collection of race, ethnicity, and language preference data for the hospital’s workforce assessments Collection of race, ethnicity, and language preference data for community/patient population assessments Improving quality of care for culturally and linguistically
How many hospitals educate staff during orientation?
81% of hospitals educate all clinical staff during orientation about how to address the unique cultural and linguistic factors affecting the care of diverse patients and communities.
What has Hospital analyzed?
Hospital has analyzed the supply and demand for
What are the key areas of equitable care?
The survey results highlight that, while more work needs to be done, advancements are being made in key areas that can promote equitable care, such as collecting demographic data, providing cultural competency training, and increasing diversity in leadership and governance.
How does diversity affect healthcare?
Diversity in healthcare has measurable benefits for both healthcare professionals and the communities they serve. Some of the key advantages of increasing the diversity of healthcare organizations include: 1 Increased provider comfort levels: Studies show that students who have trained at diverse schools are more comfortable treating patients from ethnic backgrounds other than their own. 2 Boosted creativity and innovation: A wide range of perspectives can lead to better solutions. 11 3 Enhanced understanding of value sets: A more diverse group of healthcare professionals will have a better understanding of colleagues’ and patients’ different belief systems. 12 4 Improved communication: Not only may some patients be able to more effectively communicate with providers who speak their language, but they might also receive better care. Patients with limited English proficiency experience higher rates of medical errors and worse clinical outcomes. 5 Increased patient trust: Patients of color may be more likely to seek out care. A Stanford University study found that Black male patients who were treated by Black doctors were more likely to seek preventative services than those who were treated by non-Black doctors. 6 Reduced health disparities: Improved cultural competence and ethnic and racial diversity can help to alleviate healthcare disparities and improve healthcare outcomes in diverse patient populations. 13 7 Improved employee engagement and retention: People take pride in working for companies that are making a positive impact in society.
Why is diversity important in healthcare?
It’s critical that healthcare organizations improve diversity to ensure that people of all socioeconomic backgrounds, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and genders are represented in the healthcare workforce. Doing so has a positive impact not only on the organization itself, but also on the individual patients and wider communities.
How Diverse Is Healthcare Today?
Most active physicians today are white men and more nursing and rehabilitative positions are held by women— in turn, people of color are still vastly underrepresented in these areas. It’s important for employers to understand current healthcare demographics and the barriers and challenges faced by women, people of color, and LGBTQ people in the healthcare workforce, which we’ll cover more below.
What is cultural competence in healthcare?
Harriell defines cultural competence in healthcare as “a set of behaviors, knowledge, and skills that help administrators and practitioners respond to cultural issues relating to patients. So when staff are in situations with people from different cultural backgrounds, they recognize that they are—and they have tools to respond, with the goal of providing respectful and competent care.” These tools will help create culturally competent administrators who are skilled at collaborating with a diverse team of colleagues and ensuring respectful and equal treatment of all patients.
What are the social determinants of health?
It has been demonstrated that, broadly speaking, people with diverse racial and ethnic identities have unfavorable social determinants of health such as a lack of access to high-quality education, housing, and food. 9 There is also increasing evidence that people of color experience greater incidence and more severe cases of diseases compared to white people in the United States. 10 These disparities stem from a complex system of racial inequality that has developed over generations and that, among other issues, makes access to healthcare resources more difficult or even impossible.
What are the barriers to healthcare?
People who are part of underrepresented gender, sexual, or racial groups may face obstacles in the healthcare workforce, including discrimination, fewer job offers, and uneven promotion opportunities—as well as challenges accessing the quality education they need to enter the field in the first place.
Why are black people underrepresented in STEM?
A majority of STEM workers believe that limited access to quality education is a major reason for this underrepresentation. However, 25% of U.S. STEM workers are foreign-born. 8
Diversity and Disparities: A Benchmark Study of U.S. Hospitals
This chartpack offers a snapshot of some common strategies used to improve the quality of care that hospitals provide to all patients, regardless of race or ethnicity.
Additional Resources
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How to address health disparities?
Although this article centrally addresses racial differences in the quality of care, a comprehensive approach to address inequities must begin by ensuring parity in access to care. Effectively addressing health care disparities will require comprehensive efforts by multiple sectors of society to address larger inequities in major societal institutions. There is clearly a need for concerted societal-wide efforts to confront and eliminate discrimination in education, employment, housing, criminal justice, and other areas of society which will improve the socioeconomic status (SES) of disadvantaged minority populations and indirectly provide them greater access to medical care. The United States also needs to make the moral and political commitment to guarantee access to medical care as a fundamental right of citizenship.
How has the health of black and white people improved over the past 50 years?
National data reveal that over the past 50 years, the health of both black and white persons has improved in the United States as evidenced by increases in life expectancy and declines in infant and adult mortality (National Center for Health Statistics, 1998).
How do racial stereotypes affect employment?
Studies of white employers reveal that racial stereotypes are used to deny employment opportunities to black applicants (Kirschenman and Neckerman, 1991; Neckerman and Kirschenman, 1991). Additionally, both U.S.-based and foreign companies explicitly use the racial composition of labor market areas in their decisionmaking process regarding where to locate new plants (Cole and Deskins, 1988). Not surprisingly, a Wall Street Journal analysis of the employment records of more than 35,000 U.S. companies found that black persons had a net job loss of 59,000 jobs during the 1990-1991 economic downturn, compared with net gains of 71,100 for white persons, 55,100 for Asians, and 60,000 for persons of Latin extraction (Sharpe, 1993). These job losses reflected the relocation of employment facilities to areas of lower black concentration. Audit studies of employment discrimination also find racial differences in being allowed to submit an application, in obtaining interviews, and in being offered a job. In these studies, when trained black and white job applicants with identical qualifications applied for jobs, discrimination favored the white over the black applicants in one in every five audits (Fix and Struyk, 1993).
What is systemic discrimination?
Systematic discrimination is not the aberrant behavior of a few but is often supported by institutional policies and unconscious bias based on negative stereotypes. Effectively addressing disparities in the quality of care requires improved data systems, increased regulatory vigilance, and new initiatives to appropriately train medical ...
What are the consequences of racial stereotypes?
In the United States, racial stereotypes have real-life consequences for minority groups' access to housing and employment. Based on negative stereotypes of black persons, the majority of white persons express a strong preference for living in racially segregated neighborhoods (Williams et al., 1999; Bobo and Zubrinsky, 1996), and black persons in search of housing are still systematically steered toward neighborhoods having a greater number of minorities, lower home values, and lower median income (Fix and Struyk, 1993). A review of the data on the persistence of housing discrimination in the United States concluded that, “On any given encounter between a black home-seeker and a realtor, the odds are at least 60 percent that something will happen to limit that black renter or buyer's access to housing units that are available to white persons” (Massey, Gross, and Shibuya, 1994).
How does discrimination occur?
Probably most important, much discrimination today occurs through behaviors that the perpetrator does not subjectively experience as intentional. Much contemporary discriminatory behavior is unconscious, unthinking, and unintentional (Allen, 1995; Johnson, 1988; Lawrence, 1987; Oppenheimer, 1993). As noted earlier, biases based on racial stereotypes occur automatically and without conscious awareness even by persons who do not endorse racist beliefs (Devine, 1989). Recent psychological research indicates that persons who do not see themselves as prejudiced will make health care allocation decisions that adversely affect black persons when other negative characteristics are also present (Murphy-Berman, Berman, and Campbell, 1998). For example, respondents expressed greater resentment, gave lower health care priority scores and were more reluctant to make a financial contribution to the health care costs of patients presented as black and unemployed than as white and unemployed. In real-life medical encounters, the automatic activation of stereotypes may provide the negative characterization that triggers unconscious bias. Most legislation, intervention programs, and policy regarding discrimination have been ineffective because of their focus on purposeful or intentional discrimination (Allen, 1995). Relatedly, our review also suggests that one cannot rely on the stated racial attitudes of white persons or the mere existence of laws prohibiting discrimination to ensure that it does not occur in health care settings.
What is the term for an organized system that categorizes, ranks and differentially allocates societal resources to?
The term “racism” refers to an organized system, rooted in an ideology of inferiority that categorizes, ranks and differentially allocates societal resources to human population groups (Bonilla-Silva, 1996). It may or may not be accompanied by prejudice at the individual level.
Health executives need standardized metrics for evaluating cultural competence in healthcare
Improvement initiatives that stick are ones that can be measured and subsequently improved upon. However, it still feels as if health systems are having a tough time implementing DEI solutions.
Addressing DEI disparities starts with acknowledgment and understanding
COVID-19 has uncovered extreme health inequities that have been affecting racial and ethnic minorities. We clearly see the disparity in who needs to be tested and treated versus who has received tests and treatment.
Diversity within healthcare institutions means more than diversity in doctors
Echoed time and again during the discussion was the importance of recognizing inclusivity and diversity amongst all healthcare workers, not just traditional physicians.