How Can We Change Internal Practices?
Change internal practices and align internal processes to advance equity (Read actions you can take below)
Health departments must align a wide range of internal policies and practices across their agencies in order to truly advance health equity — and importantly, to remove barriers to advancing equity. Difficult work must be done to reveal how current policies and practices support or impede equity.
Strategies vary, but may include:
- Increasing workforce diversity by changing hiring, retention, promotion, and training practices
- Building the cultural competence and humility of staff — especially those engaged in service delivery
- Focusing on accreditation, performance management, and quality improvement
- Revising administrative processes, including contracting and RFPs, to support health equity goals
- Aligning funding streams to make the biggest impact on health equity
- Assessing programs and activities according to health equity goals and metrics
Case studies that change internal practices and processes
Actions to Advance Equity Using This Practice
Your leadership, staff, and department take the following actions to change internal practices and processes:
- Use mission, vision, and values statements to communicate the priority of advancing health equity, as well as the health department’s role in addressing health equity
- Develop a strategic plan that outlines the health department’s intentions to change and align internal practices and processes to advance equity
- Include health equity language and apply a health and racial equity approach to organizational processes and procedures, including:
– Contracts/RFPs and contract reviewing
– Grant making and grant reviewing
– Hiring and human resources
– Workforce development
– Data acquisition and analysis
– Budgeting and resource allocation
– Other key organizational processes and procedures
- Create recruitment, retention, promotion, and training policies to ensure that the professional workforce — including sub-contractors — reflects the demographics of the populations served
- Use performance management and quality improvement principles, such as rapid-cycle improvement, to continuously improve policies, processes, and programs that advance health equity
- Examine public and organizational policies, rules, and regulations that facilitate or inhibit working upstream and ensure that resources are not reinforcing cultural bias, barriers, and inequities