The Challenge of Diversity in Healthcare

In my career as a clinician, manager, and consultant, I’ve been in situations where healthcare systems serve patients from diverse cultural backgrounds or socioeconomic backgrounds or even just geographic backgrounds. This presents unique challenges when it comes to delivering a truly humanized healthcare experience.

Take for example the VA clinic where I worked. We saw everybody from Toccoa, Georgia up north all the way down to Dublin, Georgia in the south rural area – that’s a wide range of people with different socioeconomic status and cultural backgrounds. Some would drive over two hours just to see us at the clinic.

The Strain on Clinicians

A significant challenge stems from clinicians on the front lines being heavily burdened by productivity metrics and utilization demands due largely to our fee-for-service model of healthcare financing. The focus often shifts towards efficiency and volume rather than patient connection creating an environment where clinicians feel overworked and taxed.

This pressure leads clinicians reduce their patients to mere diagnosis; Rafi Salazar becomes “the rotator cuff repair at eight o’clock.” In this reductionist approach, we lose sight of each individual’s unique social context which is crucial for effective treatment planning. It also abstracts for clinicians the meaning or purpose behind their work leading them closer towards burnout while depriving them off job satisfaction.

Reconnecting with Purpose: A Humanizing Approach

I’ve always said that most people who go into healthcare do so because they want to serve people – it’s more like a vocational calling than simply having a job. They desire alleviating suffering but too often end up merely surviving within an overwhelmed system that prioritizes efficiency above all else. This creates patterns of behavior among practitioners that really dehumanize patient care experiences making any genuine relationship building between the clinician and patient challenging.

The biggest change we need to make is reconnecting practitioners with their role’s purpose: helping people on their unique road to recovery. Leadership has a crucial role in giving clinicians the freedom and space to do this, perhaps by focusing on other metrics besides just efficiency ones.

In my clinic, we’ve adopted measures such as the Care and Relational Empathy Scale (CARE) which focuses on non-technical soft skills that underline the human element of healthcare. It’s these shifts towards more empathetic care models that will help us truly humanize our healthcare experiences across diverse populations.