KEY ACTIVITY #20:
Strengthen a Culture of Equity
This activity builds off of your practice's application of Key Activity 4: Use a Systematic Approach to Decrease Inequities within the Population of Focus to provide strategies and in-depth resources that can help practices create or strengthen a culture of equity in your practice. The PHMI Equity Framework and Approach emphases that achieving long-term and sustainable improvements to health and racial equity for patients and the broader ecosystem requires a transformational shift at the organizational level. The following strategies can help practices strengthen a culture of equity:
- Demonstrate senior leadership’s ownership of and commitment to improving health equity.
- Understand and address internalized, personally mediated, and institutionalized racism.
- This should include ongoing learning and development activities on the full range of health equity topics (e.g., anti-bias, structural racism, race-based algorithms).
- Build organizational capacity to support efforts to improve health equity.
- Establish practices and policies to promote workforce diversity and provide culturally and linguistically appropriate care.
- Support policy efforts to eliminate inequities driven by social drivers of health.
- This can take the form of joining advocacy efforts or supporting patients in accessing resources and services created by recent policy reforms, such as Medi-Cal Community Supports for housing or medically tailored meals. See the Key Activity 7: Use Social Needs Screening To Inform Patient Treatment Plans for a discussion on social needs.