Institute for Healthcare Improvement Partners with the AMA to Focus on Healthcare Equity
On December 6, 2022, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement launched Rise to Health: a National Coalition for Equity in Healthcare, partnering with the American Medical Association and others. The coalition seeks to improve equity, not only for patients but also for staff.
Rise to Health hopes to transform the “health care ecosystem” to one “where all people have the power, circumstances, and resources to achieve optimal health.” The coalition plans to build capacity, expand knowledge, and mobilize with concrete skills and tools to advance equity and racial justice in the health care ecosystem and communities. Ultimately, the coalition hopes to change mindsets and narratives within the health care industry around equity and racial justice, including by influencing policy, payment, education, standards, and practices.
The coalition is made up of individual practitioners; health care organizations; professional societies; payers; and pharmaceutical, research, and biotechnology organizations.
The Coalition will focus on four “critical impact areas for immediate and collective attention and action”: access, workforce, social and structural drivers of health, and quality/safety. The foundational set of actions and associated activities are broken down into six steps: (1) commit to acting for equity; (2) get grounded in history and your local context; (3) identify opportunities for improvement; (4) make equity a strategic priority; (5) take initiative; and (6) align, invest, and advocate for thriving communities.
“Burnout is an inadequate description of what the workforce is actually experiencing,” Kedar Mate, MD, president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, said in a press conference December 5. “I characterize their experience as a moral injury, which describes the phenomenon of feeling tasked to do something that workers see as part of their professional commitments but are unable to fulfill them due to structural and organizational barriers.”
During the press conference, he provided an example of an internist who described her “inability to address social inequities as being one of the reasons that drove her out” and that she felt “a sense of powerlessness, a sense that she couldn’t do more than she had originally committed herself to.”
Dr. Mate’s wife was also a physician who left her practice during the pandemic, not because of burnout, but for similar reasons to the doctor mentioned above.
Dr. Mate also explained the results of an intervention test using the coalition’s proposed methods during the press conference, noting that the intervention resulted in a 67% decrease in burnout measures while the comparative organization saw a 20% increase in turnover during the same time period.
Dr. Mate noted that the Coalition has started to work with colleagues across different organizations and after launching an invitation to join, there was an overwhelming response. The Coalition was only able to accept a little over half of the initial organizations who wanted to join, but Dr. Mate is committed to finding a way to say yes to all those who want to work on equity.
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