Paving the road to eliminating disparities and achieving health equity - Recording

1 - 2 p.m.

Although strides have been made to narrow health inequities, much work remains to close gaps in care and eliminate health disparities across diverse and vulnerable populations. The COVID-19 pandemic has further underscored these disparate outcomes, and the critical need for healthcare organizations to identify and understand the inequities and disparities that exist within their own walls and the communities they serve. To help navigate this journey, a starting point begins with a shared, clear and compelling vision of what equity is, why it matters and examining what equity looks like within your own organization.

During our next unit-based safety webinar, speakers will provide a roadmap to accelerate your equity program infrastructure and design, prioritize evidence-based interventions specific to your priority populations and mobilize successful health equity strategies to target disparities— the differences in quality of care and outcomes between different populations— directly at the point of care.

By examining the link between quality and equity as a cross-cutting dimension of quality improvement, hospital teams will learn how to re-envision and implement practical and scalable multilevel interventions to eliminate health disparities across key existing quality and unit-based safety activities guided by multidisciplinary collaboration and community stakeholder engagement. Given COVID-19’s disparate impact, participants also will explore actionable ways to promote health equity throughout the pandemic and beyond. We will also hear from a community hospital that will share their health equity journey, frontline experiences and lessons learned to address disparities during our “Equity in Action” hospital success story spotlight.

Learning objectives:

• define what health equity is, key concepts and guiding principles;
• describe the relationship between quality and equity and how to integrate disparities reduction into QI efforts;
• understand how to develop an equity framework and apply an equity lens to unit-based safety activities, strategies and high reliability practices to achieve equitable outcomes;
• create an action plan to identify and address disparities and target interventions to reduce disparities; and
• describe actionable approaches to promote health equity, and address health inequities illuminated by COVID-19.

EQIC invites and encourages the attendance of hospital staff responsible for unit-based safety, health equity and diversity, community engagement, diversity, equity and inclusion, chief equity officers, including key liaisons, CNO/CQOs, frontline providers and staff, educators, patient safety managers, quality data analytics and quality improvement team members.

Note: This event was originally scheduled for November 10th.

Speakers:

Aswita Tan-McGrory, MBA, MSPH, Administrative Director, the Mongan Institute, Director, the Disparities Solutions Center at Massachusetts General Hospital

Rebecca Filson, FNP-BC, Hospitalist, Southwestern Vermont Medical Center

Bentley Munsell, BSN, RN, CEN, EMT, Clinical Coordinator, Emergency Department, Southwestern Vermont Medical Center