Human Resources- Wild Card

This week the assignment is a wild card blog entry. So I decided to look to the libraries database and found an interesting journal article which i will summarize and then give my opinion on.

The article I choose is the journal, The Health Care Manager and is titled, "Examining Human Resources efforts to develop a culturally competent Workforce." The article defines cultural competency as,"the ability of health professionals and organizations to provide services to patients with diverse beliefs, values and practice in a manner that meets patients cultural, social and linguistic needs." The importance of this topic is due to the increased prevalence of the minority population. If health professionals are not able to effectively meet the need of a diverse customer base then they will hinder the quality and access of service they provide and will lose a competitive edge in the market. Their is also a second part of cultural competency which deals with the recruitment and selection of a diverse workforce. The article states that studies show that a diverse workforce helps an organization overcome sociocultural barriers.

Increasing the diversity of a workforce can foster innovation, improve cooperation, increase and performance levels. These benefits will lead to improved quality, increased access, decreased costs and improved patient safety and health care outcomes. In order for an organization to be culturally competent they must have effective diversity management. Meaning, they must have policies and procedure which complement a diverse workforce and population. The focus of the article in on the efforts of the human recourse department to recruit and train staff in a way that fosters cultural competency.

For this article a questionnaire was sent out to 101 hospitals in the southeast region. The purpose was to inquire about the hospitals recruitment efforts, training practices and other efforts related to developing a culturally and linguistically competent workforce. Some of the interesting results obtained are as followed: 77% actively recruit employees from various ethnic backgrounds, 74% have persons from different ethnic backgrounds in leadership positions, 87% of staff are provided with training to care for patients with cultural difference, 44% have trained interpreters on staff.

Overall the findings indicated that most human resource departments focus their efforts on recruiting ethically divers individuals and training clerical and nursing staff to deal with diverse patients. The article suggest that HR focus on identifying the demographics pf the area they serve, to ensure groups are adequately represented. One way to ensure that diverse individuals are recruited properly is to partner with statewide or community based organization that support culturally diverse groups.

I found this article very informative. I like how in the survey they not only asked about the staff diversity but whether there were diverse leaders in the organization. The study showed that those with diverse leaders were more focused on diversity and seemed to realize the importance of providing patients with a more comfortable environment, one where their ethnicity was represented. It is important to keep the patient comfortable not only for cooperation's and satisfaction but for a positive word of mouth.