Physician Staffing Blog

Healthcare News and Trends

New White Paper Examines Diversity in Healthcare

January 12, 2021

By Phillip Miller, VP at Merritt Hawkins

The coronavirus pandemic has reinforced the sobering fact that healthcare disparities persist throughout the United States. These include disparities in the quality and accessibility to care that patients receive based on their race and other factors, as well as racial and other disparities in the healthcare workforce.

A new white paper from AMN Healthcare (Merritt Hawkins’ parent company) examines these disparities and the consequent need for greater diversity among both clinical and administrative healthcare professionals.

Entitled, Healthcare Diversity in the Spotlight, the new white paper considers diversity in healthcare through the prisms of race, gender, age, sexual orientation, and other categories. It includes statistics demonstrating the continued lack of diversity among physicians, nurses and other clinical professionals, in addition to a lack of diversity among health facility executives. The white paper reviews the benefits of leadership diversity in healthcare, which include an enhanced ability to innovate by gaining a variety of perspectives, a particularly important advantage in implementing population health management programs.

The white paper concludes with recommendations and insights regarding how hospitals and other healthcare facilities can effectively recruit for diversity. These include starting diversity efforts at the board level, setting specific diversity targets, and creating diverse search committees.

The white paper offers useful data and analysis at a time when healthcare disparities and workforce diversity in healthcare are more important than ever.

Download your copy of white paper here.

Phillip Miller is Vice President of Communications for Merritt Hawkins and Staff Care, companies of AMN Healthcare. He can be reached at Phil.Miller@amnhealthcare.com.