Emerging Equity: Public Health Approach

 Health Equity & Health Systems Improvement

Applying a public health framework to the internal culture of the healthcare organization can improve capacity to serve two populations: that organization’s staff and their patient populations.

Whether within clinical healthcare delivery facilities or public health institutions, healthcare systems are often overly complex, haphazardly structured, and deeply impacted by shifts in leadership, funding structures, and the lack of clearly identifiable processes. We find that it is less common for healthcare systems and workflows to be designed through application of organizational development principles and practices and more by shifting sands of funding, policy, and leadership changes. Due to ever-changing political and funding pressures and the lack of intentional organizational development, inequities and breakdowns in communication frequently arise. This contributes to lack of retention and poor organizational health in an industry already rife with high turnover and burnout.

At Emerging Equity, we spent years developing organizational development processes that allow for an organization to better align their communications, structures, and processes with their missions and visions. This requires organizations to tend to relationships as much as structures. Drawing on our team’s experiences in healthcare settings, we have adapted those processes to support both clinical healthcare delivery, healthcare administration, and public health organizations a uniquely tailored process to achieve similar alignment. Far too often, healthcare settings focus on alleviation of inequities in the greater patient populations that they serve but do so at the expense of their own workforce by not devoting adequate attention to internal organizational health. This reduces the actual potential of those systems to realize their fullest capacity and have the impact they’d like to have on the populations they serve.

Emerging Equity’s tailored process applies the principles of organizational development, equity, trauma-informed communication and dialogue, public health, and harm reduction to internal organizational culture. This combination of lenses forms one framework whereby health internal to the organization’s own culture can be prioritized alongside the patients and communities you serve, and both can be served at higher capacity.