How you can take the lead in introducing cultural competence to your care delivery team.

Cultural competence is the ability to understand, appreciate, and interact with people from cultures or belief systems different from one's own. Starting around fifty years ago, health care has tried to integrate cultural competence into clinical curricula and health care settings, but not without challenges.

Cultural competence isn’t typically prioritized and receives little funding for research and implementation. Historically, there wasn’t a standard for cultural competence and culturally competent care. Until now.

Violet has created the first-ever standardization of cultural competence for clinicians.

Because it’s time for health care to get ahead of the curve: Culturally diverse patients can’t find the inclusive care they deserve, even though 50% of Americans will be a member of at least one culturally diverse community by 2045.

That’s why Violet created the first infrastructure for inclusive care. By benchmarking cultural competence for clinicians, and providing educational pathways for them to upskill, Violet’s democratizing data across the health care industry, making it easier than ever for patients to find the right clinicians for them.

Interested in helping your patients access the care they deserve?

We’re here to help you improve your team’s cultural competence in sustainable and tangible ways. Let us help you address inequities in the health care system by delivering inclusive care.

Top health care providers are already choosing Violet to:

• ‍Build a clinical team and organizational culture centered on continuous learning and inclusion
• Provide cultural competence education to care delivery teams‍
• ‍Attract diverse groups of job candidates
• Benchmark, track, and report cultural competence metrics
• Match diverse patients with Violet-benchmarked clinicians

Whether you’re a DEI strategy leader, clinical operations leader, or CEO of a health care organization, establishing a diversity and inclusion strategy takes effort. Still, the potential benefits of improved patient satisfaction and health outcomes, diverse hiring, and stronger business performance are well worth it.

Offering cultural competence education is a benefit that can be used to attract diversity during the hiring process. According to the McKinsey & Company study Delivering Through Diversity, companies with diverse leadership were more profitable and had greater market value than those without it.

Less diversity and cultural competence in health care settings are particularly worrisome. Here are just a few examples:‍

• ‍29 percent of transgender patients were refused to be seen by their providers‍
• 15 percent of LGBTQIA Americans report postponing or avoiding medical treatment due to discrimination
• Black patients are 10 percent less likely to be admitted to hospitals compared to white patients

Having no cultural competence strategy hurts patients first and foremost, but it also harms business and reputation.

Health care is losing patients because there’s a lack of cultural sensitivity. Raise your standard of care by choosing Violet.

With increasing patient diversity, cultural competence education is becoming a top priority—even if not your absolute highest—here are five best practices for implementing, improving, and sustaining cultural competence efforts.

Include the entire team.

‍First and foremost, it’s crucial that leadership has buy-in and genuine enthusiasm for cultural competence. When leadership supports a cause, there’s a greater chance that the rest of the team will get behind the mission and prioritize cultural competence education. Establishing a culture of empathy, inclusion, and equity for patients requires everyone’s dedication.

Hold everyone accountable.

‍It’s not about being punitive, it’s about creating an internal culture of curiosity, growth, and professional development at every level. It’s helpful to establish team-wide goals for cultural competence education and encourage the team to get involved through emails, group conversations, and making realistic expectations of your busy care team. It may inspire the team to communicate the benefits of Violet’s continuing education: cultural competence has been shown to improve patient satisfaction, health outcomes, and retention. Clinicians who are supported, inspired, and understand the importance of upskilling their care delivery are more likely to hold themselves accountable.

Stay on top of continuing education.

‍Set quarterly goals across the entire team to establish flexible deadlines for completing cultural competence education. HR can take the lead by regularly checking in via email and inviting team members to group conversations. Violet also offers exclusive webinars for customers who train through our e-learning. These activities can help foster growth and dedication if there’s a sense of shared responsibility and engagement.

Prioritize recognition.

‍Positivity is key. When a team member onboards and completes education, these accomplishments are a wonderful opportunity for HR and other leaders to offer recognition. Recognition will signal to others that leadership values the team’s dedication to cultural competence education. Positive reinforcement may also improve the number of team members who eventually upskill. ‍

Measure and assess efforts.

‍Once enough team members go through onboarding and education with Violet, we invite all of our customers to use our services to measure and evaluate benchmarking and outcomes. We’re currently authoring a case study to analyze the overall success of training our partner’s care delivery team. Check out Violet's case study about our customer's success here.

‍Want to learn more about Violet? Book a demo today.