How do we sustain equity work over the long term?

10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication

Organizations are considering how they can sustain equity work over the long term.

I’m excited about today’s episode because it’s the 7th Anniversary of Health Communication Partners. And I get to talk to you about a trend I’ve seen and been a part of with organizations pursuing equity and health equity goals. I wonder if you’ve seen it too. It’s around concerns about this being sustainable. As in, How do we keep this going? How do we make it last?

Hi, everybody. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, and this is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, recently ranked number 20 in the top 100 podcasts and the social sciences by Goodpods.

So, yeah! It’s been seven years for Health Communication Partners, my Woman-Owned Small Business. It’s been a huge pleasure and a privilege after a 20 plus year career in academia and education to start my own business and help you reach your goals. What we’re doing together is unique. It’s not a typical approach or what you’re typically going to hear. So thank you for trusting me and HCP.

Thank you too to my awesome clients. Maybe you’ve taken my courses or we’ve partnered on consulting or research services, sometimes all three. So thank you for letting me work alongside you and get to know you, get to know your work.

And thanks for listening to the show. You know, you’re going to hear things that you won’t hear other places. That’s why you’re here. It’s not the same as what you’ll typically get.

And I love to hear from you. If you’ve never been in touch, now’s the time. It’s our anniversary. Let me know you’re here. Find me on linked or go to h -cpartners .com or if you get my newsletter, hit reply, comes right to me. Hearing from you and your stories is a big part of my work. It’s part of what helps this all stay grounded in the realities of day -to -day work.

So let me hear about what you’re doing. And speaking of what you’re doing. I want you to think about the equity work you’re in the middle of now.

Take a moment and consider this: How would you like things to look in five years? What would you want to see happening or maybe not happening? While you’re thinking on that, I’ll go back in time a little. Over the past few years, I’ve podcasted about trends that I’ve seen in equity work from my vantage point as a consultant who works with organizations who are doing equity -oriented work or are pursuing goals and including equity concerns in them.

And the years since 2020 have been unique and incredibly busy on the equity front. I remember in 2020 being on a Zoom call with Dr. Camara Jones. Dr. Camara Jones is a family physician and longtime leader in equity in health care and public health. And in this call, Dr. Jones was addressing the explosion of interest in issues of equity and health equity, which had just started to happen, largely in response to the pandemic and the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor. And she put it like this, Some of you are a little late to the party, but welcome.

And I loved that metaphor and it stayed with me. So no matter how long you’ve been at the party, inequalities and their root causes have become almost common knowledge. One of my clients said health equity became “buzzy.” All of you, I’m sure, can speak to the why and the who and the what of inequalities and their root causes and what you have been doing to address them. Many organizations get that equity is not a short -term project, not something you fix and are done with, but is embedded in how you do business as usual.

Organizations have elements in place, and there are things they know to do, and they’ve been doing them, bringing people to the table who traditionally have not had a seat. There’s a lot of collaboration. You’ve got data. You’ve got stories to tell. Yes, some organizations are dealing with blowback of different kinds, but lessons are being learned.

The conversation is evolving. And this is meaningful to witness and be a part of. Because no matter how long organizations have been addressing equity, I’m seeing a new wave of questions and insights and possibilities. This overall vision is of a sophisticated, active organization who’s embedding equity in core processes and asking the question, how do we keep this going? How do we make this last?

I see this is a different question than a primary one that people were asking a couple years ago, which was, what do we do now?

The question, how do we keep this going? How do we make this last? I see this as a shift that involves keeping our eye on the long game. And focusing on our long term takes a different skill set and a different mindset that deserves support.

Over the years, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with the best, be deep in the thick of it with organizations in health care and government and academia and industry. And though some of this can feel like uncharted territory, there is quite a lot that is known about walking this path of equity. Like Dr. Camara Jones said, there’s been a party going on. We’re really glad you’re here. So there is much that’s known about the twists and terms of doing this kind of work, what you’re likely to face, what it takes to do this work long term.

And there is a framework I use to guide me and my clients and bring this research and knowledge to them. And this framework is called BRIDGES.

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about BRIDGES. If you get our newsletter, you know it’s called BRIDGES. Well, this is why. BRIDGES is continuous improvement. Like Agile, but for equity. And I want to talk about it now because it helps with this shift I’m seeing to include long-term thinking and equity strategy.

Because long -term work and short -term work are different. If we want to promote equity in sustainable ways in our organizations, we need to be good at both of them. Thinking and working long-term and short-term together, that is tricky. We’re all human. We tend to focus on what’s in front of us, right? Putting out fires, the immediate needs. And it’s important to have short -term victories and short -term work and deal with the immediate pressing needs.

But long -game thinking is different. It involves stepping away from that press for quick answers, that press for certainty. It can involve being more comfortable with waiting, being more comfortable with being uncomfortable. And this takes different skill sets than time -bounded projects.

If an organization wants to keep reaping the benefits, it’s got to keep doing the work. But it is doable, right? It’s not a mystery. There is a research base and proven approaches that really work.

Now, I said BRIDGES is continuous improvement. You know continuous improvement by now. You’ve got a problem or a question. We gather data. We act based on the data. And then we evaluate to see what happened. How do we do? We use our findings to inform our next steps. We act and we reflect. We act and we reflect. This approach to reflection and action that I have that I use with my clients and that you hear in the show is from the research at the University of Pennsylvania.

And it’s especially well suited to when there’s a lot of unknowns, when problems aren’t clear, but they’re messy and indeterminate and ill-defined.

And also in situations where you’ve got to act smarter than just trial and error. Many of my clients are in contexts where throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks is just not an option. They have to be much more informed and intentional and strategic and tactical.

And it also helps with innovation. I’m hearing more edgy, exciting, potentially transformative questions being asked. I think now, perhaps with the experience to reflect on and some successes and the larger priority that equity still holds for a lot of us, folks see there’s new vistas opening up too. Imagine where this could go. Look what we could do with this. Now, how do we help ourselves get there?

These are next level questions, and they demand next level work. If this sounds like you, BRIDGES can help. Because we’ve always known this was a long game. We have our short game and our long game. Everything on the show and the site at Health Communication Partners.com is grounded in the BRIDGES framework.

Yes, we need quick wins. Yes, we need short-term gains. Yes. But these need to be connected to a long-term strategy that’s cohesive, that’s grounded in your organization’s unique culture as well as in your data. And that’s what BRIDGES supports.

I first articulated BRIDGES back pre -COVID times in 2019 when I was doing a series of talks at Columbia University with the Region 2 Public Health Training Center. And it’s evolved since then, in part because the conversation is evolving. And part of this evolution is organizations seeing for themselves how much there is the gain and how much can be done.

And that it becomes a mindset, a way of working. That’s what BRIDGES is. You’ve got the mindset and the skill set from this research base at University of Pennsylvania. And it’s been my great privilege to carry it across sectors and work with organizations, from mom and pop startups to Fortune 100.

My clients are always looking for new ways to embed equitable, inclusive practices in their core processes,
whether it’s patient outcomes, community engagement, employee retention.

Across my clients, leaders are also all seeking to support their teams who are doing difficult work. They want to keep the momentum going, strike the right tone, the right cadence, maybe even draw more people in.

And these are highly experienced teams we’re talking about, people with deep involvement in issues that are coming together. There’s a lot of power there, and BRIDGES helps channel that power.

Everyone wants to derive the well -documented benefits of equity work–better outcomes, satisfaction, engagement, experience. And if we don’t want equity to be a checkbox, we have to think and work long -term, as well as short -term. The good news is there are well-established, research-based ways of working. And as I said, it’s been incredibly meaningful and exciting to take these concepts and this research and this knowledge base and see how it helps my clients. See it really working.

Clients find new ways of being smart together, new ways to extend and enrich their work, new ways of tapping in to the expertise and experience of their teams, new ways to collaborate, new tools to reach their goals.

These are important goals and worthy goals that you’re working on. We can do this. My clients are doing it. You can do it, too. To learn more about BRIDGES, visit healthcommunicationpartners .com or find me on linked. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, and this has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Audio engineering and music by Joe Lebel, additional music from Alexis Rounds. Thanks for listening to 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners LLC. Find us at health communication partners .com.

The post How do we sustain equity work over the long term? appeared first on Health Communication Partners.