Managing Diversity

Managing Diversity

Diversity in healthcare is more than achieving inclusivity beyond the language barrier. It entails understanding the patient’s mindset with a wider scope of gender, culture, sexual orientation, socioeconomic realities, and religious beliefs. As Koehl (2016) explains, diversity is essential in the medical field to ensure the provision of adequate and high-quality services in patient population.

Team Description

The absence of a diverse team of physicians makes it difficult for patients to benefit from physicians appropriately. Understanding the importance of diversity in healthcare, I would advise facilities to avoid homogeneous workforce in order to avoid limiting the capabilities of medication within a parameter of particular values and lens. For instance, a transgender patient can best be treated by a team of professionals from diverse backgrounds and cultures to respond to the patient’s needs effectively. An institution in California with a balanced proportion of male and female practitioners from different ethnic backgrounds – African American, Latin, Asian, Indian, Caucasian, among others – will provide better services than one where the team is limited to a homogeneous team of male white doctors and white female nurses only.

Building a Successful Multicultural Team

As explained by Koehl (2016), building a successful multicultural team involves an array of activities that requires the implementation of the organizational framework in place. To begin with, one should:

1. Identify a team leader who has cross-cultural competency with a high degree of cultural flexibility and low degree of ethnocentrism.
2. Team members should be selected based on the project’s objectives.
3. The third step entails starting the project by providing the team members with the opportunity to know and connect with each other. The team leader and the members should build relations and trust in order to create a stable foundation for undertaking business operations successfully.
4. In order to boost the relations, it is important to learn about the differences inherent in the team members in terms of social background, culture, and career paths among others.
5. In order to reduce the chances of conflicts, it is important to clarify expectations from the team members to understand how decisions will be made and pertinent issues to achieve project objectives.
6. Communication is crucial and should be descriptive and conveyed in a positive attitude to avoid conflicts.
7. At this point, the leader should implement and respect deadlines to create discipline in the team.
8. Continuous team success can be promoted by assessing the team’s work and the possibility of trouble or conflicts in the team.

The Impact of Diversity in Healthcare

Diversity in healthcare is an influential strategy that helps to improve patient outcome directly. According to Nair & Adetayo (2016), increasing racial diversity amongst healthcare professional helps to increase access to healthcare which provides patients with greater satisfaction owing to improved communication between the patient and clinicians and educational experience. Diversity provides clinicians with a better base which enables them to offer improved patient care. Understanding the inherent differences in patients about death, medicine, languages, beliefs, and afterlife enables healthcare practitioners to relate to patients and assist them to understand their medical situations. This is because professionals who are able to understand the culture of patients are in a better position to have personal conversations with them and propose the most effective course of action for the patients.

References

Koehl, C., (2016). Managing Diversity: 10 Steps to Multicultural Team Success. Training. Retrieved from https://trainingmag.com/managing-diversity-10-steps-multicultural-team-success/

Grant, S. (2010). Diversity in healthcare: Driven by leadership. Frontiers of health services management, 26(3), 41. https://search.proquest.com/openview/afbcfa6e575223f71a57f1b7d2e1a5ab/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=36179

Nair, L., & Adetayo, O. A. (2019). Cultural Competence and Ethnic Diversity in Healthcare. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Global Open, 7(5). doi: 10.1097/GOX.0000000000002219