In this section:

Definitions

For Texas Health:

• Diversity represents unique individual characteristics and traits, both visible and invisible, in which people are different and alike.
• Equity creates a work environment where everyone has an equal opportunity to do their life's best work, and no one is disadvantaged because of their unique characteristics and traits.
• Inclusion creates a work environment where everyone can fully contribute to business success, and each person's contribution is valued for their distinctive skills, experiences and perspectives.

Priorities

Texas Health set six strategic priorities to advance Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives across the system and throughout our communities.

Diversity in Talent

What makes our people unique is what allows them to care better for others.

Objectives

We seek to create a work environment where everyone can participate in contributing to business success — a place where:

• Each person's contributions are valued for their distinctive skills, experiences and perspectives.
• Everyone has a voice and all voices are heard.
• Everyone can be authentic, feel they belong and reach their full potential.

We also want to attract and retain a diverse workforce and leadership pipeline that reflects the demographic composition of the communities we are privileged to serve.

Approach

We are building a culture of belonging and an inclusive work environment where everyone can be authentic. We honor and celebrate workplace diversity and integrate inclusion practices into our policies and hiring practices.

Inclusive Recruitment

While two-thirds of our workforce is comprised of women and nearly half are ethnic minorities, we continue to cultivate a diverse talent pool by:

• Proactively reviewing equal employment opportunity policies and practices to ensure we do not create unintended barriers.
• Introducing students in underserved communities to vocational healthcare careers through apprenticeships and learn-while-you-earn training programs in collaboration with Dallas College, Tarrant County College, WeLearn and TRC Healthcare. We also offer these programs to existing employees considering a career change or looking to improve their skills and advance.
• Engaging local and national military agencies, such as the Texas Veterans Commission, Copeland Soldier Services and Military Excellence Growth Association, to attract military veterans to work for Texas Health.
• Providing behavioral-based interview training to hiring managers to help them identify and mitigate unconscious biases that may arise in the hiring process.

Additionally, we are beginning to forge new partnerships with Historically Black Colleges & Universities and local Hispanic, Asian and Black Chambers of Commerce so we can hold career fairs and network with students interested in healthcare careers.

2022 Highlights

Texas Health:

• Created a dedicated Charge Nurse position to help provide equitable growth opportunities for all nurses.
• Accelerated the hiring and development of individuals in diverse communities who completed our fast-track apprenticeship programs.
• Continued delivering behavioral-based interviewing training for hiring managers; conscious inclusion training for leaders, physicians and staff; and cultural competency, harassment and retaliation-free workplace training for employees.

Leadership Diversity

Texas Health is committed to building a leadership pipeline that reflects the demographics of the communities we serve. One of the newest ways we do this is through our Readying Inspiring leaders with Skills to promote Equity (R.I.S.E.) DEI leadership program. The four-month program trains diverse aspiring leaders to support key Texas Health DEI initiatives and enhance their leadership development and civic engagement skills.

Through Texas Health R.I.S.E., participants:

• Discuss critical healthcare issues and social responsibilities that are important to achieving Texas Health's long-term sustainability and Mission, Vision and Values.
• Connect with a diverse group of highly motivated individuals to promote conversational learning, share resources and collaborate on meeting key business and community objectives across channels, functions and business units.
• Create positive change and apply new skills, knowledge and resources to their respective roles, workplaces and communities.
• Examine strategic business issues such as consumer data and insights, product development and innovation, and racial equity and healthcare disparities.
• Build a think tank of individuals to spark innovation, drive best practices, develop strategies and implement solutions.
• Promote and elevate diverse voices to sustain an inclusive, empowered and engaged workforce.

2022 Highlights

Texas Health:

• Completed two R.I.S.E. DEI leadership training cohorts with 60 staff.
• Increased leadership diversity within ethnic minority and female leaders at the director level and above by 7.9% and 3.2%, respectively, over 2021.

Inclusive Dialog

Each entity has a Diversity Action Team that inspires and brings our people together to educate, promote and celebrate their unique traditions and practices. Team members also:

• Build awareness of behaviors associated with inclusivity and culturally competent care.
• Facilitate respectful and courageous conversations to encourage listening, learning and genuine relationships.
• Plan cultural events and activities.

Additionally, we listen to and gather feedback from a DEI Advisory Group of more than 300 employees to gather their ideas and insights. For example, they provided feedback on cultural holidays and events we should celebrate and how to take a more inclusive approach to help diverse consumers navigate our healthcare system.

2022 Highlights

Texas Health:

• Created an Inclusive Calendar Guide and glossary of DEI terminology and added gender pronouns to email signatures.
• Adopted Juneteenth as a recognized holiday.
• Honored nearly 200 employees with Mosaic pins for providing outstanding support of diversity in the workplace and our communities.
• Scored 85% favorable on the inclusion metric in our Care Team Insights Survey, which was 1% higher than in 2021 and 6% higher than the national average – putting us in the top 75th percentile.

Training, Tools and Resources

We provide training programs and resources designed to reduce conscious and unconscious bias, prevent discrimination and harassment, and effectively manage DEI issues in the workplace. We also:

• Communicate information about systemwide DEI priorities and initiatives, tools and resources.
• Coach managers on how to have courageous conversations with employees about their unique experiences and perspectives.
• Share cultural awareness stories from our care teams to improve understanding of our differences.
• Help employees navigate language differences by offering on-demand interpretation services. Bilingual employees help us communicate more effectively with limited-English-proficient consumers.
• Create a safe place for meaningful dialog by establishing communication channels to listen, learn and exchange knowledge.

2022 Highlights

Texas Health:

• Offered a series of hosted conversations that used a “show, don’t tell” method of leading conversations to fuel a more open, inclusive environment.
• Developed tools and resources to prevent harassment, discrimination and unsafe behaviors by care team members, patients, visitors and others who interact with Texas Health.

Please see our 2022 Social Purpose Summary Report for workplace diversity data.

Diversity in Governance

Objective

We seek to compile governing bodies reflective of the demographics of the communities we serve to advance our Mission, Vision and Values.

Approach

Texas Health routinely updates a unique competency profile used for recruiting new board members to provide a mix of diverse competencies among our systemwide Board of Trustees and members of our wholly owned boards.

We review our leadership plans annually and analyze gaps between existing and needed competencies. We also assess the representative characteristics of board committees to balance their unique traits.

2022 Highlights

Texas Health:

• Increased the diversity of our Board of Trustees by adding 3% more ethnic minorities and 10% more female leaders over the last two years.

Supplier Diversity

Objective

We aim to support our communities by identifying, providing and tracking business opportunities for minority- and women-owned businesses (MWOBs).

Approach

Weidentify potential diverse suppliers by engaging members of the Dallas-Fort Worth Minority Supplier Development Council, U.S. Pan Asian Chamber of Commerce, Hispanic Chambers of Commerce, National Minority Supplier Development Council and Premier’s Diverse Supplier Committee. We also are members of the Strategic Marketplace Initiative Diversity Task Force and the U.S. Health & Human Services’ Taskforce on Forced Labor.

Our supplier portal enables diverse suppliers to submit information about their capabilities and services, and register their business and diversity certifications. It also contains tools and resources to help them identify potential business opportunities quickly and complete the MWOB certification process if desired.

To make our Request for Proposal policy more inclusive, we added language encouraging MWOBs to bid on projects and considered suppliers’ diversity status when assessing potential business contracts.

2022 Highlights

Texas Health:

• Increased our spending with MWOBs and enabled 68 new diverse suppliers to submit information for contract consideration.
• Began developing a formal mentorship program for diverse vendors.

Clinical Care Equity

Objective

We aim to create quality and safety outcomes that are not independently differentiated by social or demographic factors.

Approach

Texas Health has been working to:

• Facilitate access to equitable care that is timely, high-quality and safe across Texas Health regardless of consumers’ race, ethnicity, social conditions, economic status or any dimension of diversity.
• Recognize and address social determinants of health (the economic and social conditions that influence individual and group differences in health status).
• Deliver culturally competent, sensitive care in direct alignment with our Vision of partnering with consumers for a lifetime of health and well-being.

2022 Highlights

Texas Health:

• Continued collecting race, ethnicity and language (REaL) data and incorporating it into clinical reports and dashboards to help us identify areas of inequity.
• Identified opportunities to reduce clinical variability among demographic groups within our service lines. For example, we deployed new policies and clinical workflows for risk assessment, early recognition and evidence-based management of obstetrical hemorrhage to reduce the rates of maternal morbidity in Black women. We also began developing a C-section Reliable Care Blueprinting™ module to deploy consistent, evidence-based processes across the system and identified labor management techniques that can be used to help reduce C-section rates in mothers of all races.
• Activated an electronic hypertension registry to evaluate variations in blood pressure control by race and ethnicity in our Texas Health Physicians Group outpatient population. This information will be used to help us develop and focus quality improvement plans.

Health Disparities

Objective

We seek to develop internal and external partnerships to address and reduce community health disparities.

Approach

Texas Health identifies health disparities and high-need communities through our Community Health Needs Assessment and other evaluation tools. Findings inform investments in and the execution of Community Impact grants, Community Health Improvement and North Texas Healthy Communities initiatives.

We identify collaborative agencies and ideate disruptive, innovative solutions that will help reduce health disparities and demonstratively improve the health status of high-risk and under-resourced individuals in our communities. Our overall goal is to address social determinants of health before the resulting problems surface in the form of chronic disease and premature death.

Additionally, we advocate for healthcare coverage expansion to extend services and resources to uninsured, underinsured and underserved communities and invest in graduate medical education, nursing and allied health development programs to place clinicians where they are most needed.

2022 Highlights

• See the Health Equity & Improvement section to learn more about the progress being made to reduce disparities in our communities.

Inclusive and Welcoming Environment for our Patients and their Families

Objectives

We aim to create a culturally welcoming environment that embraces the diverse identities of the consumers, patients and families that Texas Health is proud to serve.

Approach

Given that our region comprises multicultural families who speak more than 100 languages, we are working to understand our population better so that we can address their needs. To aid this effort, we capture REaL (race, ethnicity and language) data and insights about consumers’ cultural heritage, language, beliefs and religious background. This allows us to deliver care that honors their individual preferences.

Additionally, we are:

• Using in-person and virtual interpreters to help us communicate more effectively with consumers, patients and their loved ones. Our interpreters are surveying patients to gain greater insight into how to best provide information on their care experience.
• Producing clinical education in preferred languages, providing outpatient resources that address cultural dietary needs, and sharing patients’ religious and cultural medical insights with our staff.
• Incorporating language, dietary, religious and cultural preferences into our care plans at all sites.
• Improving consumers’ understanding of health education resources and follow-up instructions to remove barriers that may inhibit care.

2022 Highlights

Texas Health:

• Developed robust dashboards that stratify the consumer experience and outcomes by race, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation and gender identity. This will help us identify needs, prioritize investments and execute strategies that drive improvement.
• Standardized health literacy for all consumer-facing documents to ensure they are at a 6th-grade reading level or below.
• Used an interpreter to round on Spanish-speaking patients, helping translate more than 1 million minutes of conversation in the first six months of 2022 alone.