Making Heads Count:

Bridging the Cultural Competence Gap

At a time when healthcare providers are under pressure to provide culturally and linguistically competent care, everyone must understand the important role of diversity in patient satisfaction, reducing health disparities, and increasing market share.

Cultural Competency and Patient-Centered Care

“If the goal of the American medical system is to
provide optimal care for all patients, healthcare
providers must understand cultural differences that
create conflicts and misunderstandings and can result
in inferior medical care,” states Geri Ann Galanti in her
2008 book, Caring for Patients from Different
Cultures. The UCLA School of Medicine anthropologist
provides more than 200 case studies that illustrate
cross-cultural misunderstanding as well as cultural
competence in healthcare.

Preparing caregivers to be culturally competent is a
key to building patient satisfaction. “Culturally competent healthcare is at its core patient-centered care,” Galanti states. Patients from an increasingly diverse population will also identify most easily with those that represent their language, customs, and beliefs. Diversity in recruiting and developing talent guarantees a higher rate of success. At the same time, both patient and caregiver must be extremely careful not
to stereotype each other, resulting in even worse cultural mistakes.

Recruiting Representative Talent and Increasing Market Share

Most diversity programs start in the recruiting arena
after a company recognizes that its talent pool could
be much richer and more representative of the
communities it serves. For healthcare, the challenge
lies in its various tiers of professionals. In the Aetna
video, “Closing the Health Care Gap: Aetna’s Call to
Action,” 1 B. Wayne Kong, PhD, JD, states that “70
percent of the cardiologists in this country are white
men.” Getting the referral to a cardiologist is the first
hurdle, but finding one that understands your culture is the second. Attracting new talent representative of the
community will require administrative cultural competence. And it will result in an increase in market share as diverse populations hear from friends and family about good experiences.

Non-clinical members of the care team can help to bridge
the gap in diversity representation. The people who clean the rooms, transport people to and from their tests, or even come in to fix the TV or Nurse Call button are viewed by patients as an everyday part of the hospital community and are as diverse as the patients themselves.

Crothall Competence in Diversity

Even members of a hospital’s support services departments must treat patients in a culturally representative and competent way. Crothall Services Group embraces this concept. Our approach to diversity and inclusion mirrors and supports those of our clients. It means more than embracing difference and similarity; we believe it is an opportunity to leverage the experiences, backgrounds, thoughts, abilities, and expectations of our associates to aid every effort in
providing equal care for our healthcare customers.

We provide teams that often represent a community’s
demographics. Housekeepers and transporters at the
facility often interact with patients and can provide insight into the patient’s world for clinical workers. Our other services—facilities management, laundry, and clinical equipment services—are highly visible and necessary to ensuring a comfortable, welcoming patient experience.

Ingrained into company strategic objectives, the HR
Strategy and Diversity guiding principles center on

• Attracting talent by diverse recruitment
• Retaining diverse talent through education and communication
• Developing diverse talent with Talent Management
• Engaging diverse talent by inclusion practices
• Encouraging great performance by elevating diverse talent

Our parent company, Compass Group, is itself composed
of a diverse group of businesses. Each company in the
group is guided by its own Diversity Action Council
(“DAC”). Compass Group rewards the best diversity
initiatives with the coveted 5 Jewel Award and Compass
in the Community Award.

Crothall's Diversity Action Council

Crothall’s DAC provides strategies and guidelines that are specific to healthcare support services. Council members are representative of all lines of service, management levels, and geographies in addition to cultural background, age group, gender, and race. As they navigate cultural competency within our teams, the many voices are expected to work together to create a powerful message to guide us.

Today’s practice of diversity and inclusion looks very
different from 20, 10, or even 5 years ago, and the new
philosophy is, “Don’t count heads; make heads count!” As our healthcare clients look to us for maturity in cultural competence, Crothall teams are prepared to keep pace, if not a step ahead.