WSCC Employees Chosen for Disparties Leadership Program
Date: 10/17/22
Boston
Western Sky Community Care employees selected for national leadership program to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare
Rose Nelson, Amir Wodajo, and Jennifer Ferreira of Western Sky Community Care have been selected to participate in a year-long executive leadership program designed to address racial and ethnic disparities in health care. Nelson, Wodajo, and Ferreira are three of only 30 individuals from six healthcare organizations from around the United States to be selected for the Disparities Leadership Program 2022-2023. They will join a cohort of 226 other organizations that have or are currently participating in the Disparities Leadership Program from 2007 to the present.
The Disparities Leadership Program, the first program of its kind in the nation, is designed for leaders from hospitals, health insurance plans, and other healthcare organizations who are seeking to develop practical strategies to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health care. The program is led by the Disparities Solutions Center (DSC) at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, Massachusetts.
Through the DLP, the DSC aims to create leaders prepared to meet the challenges of healthcare transformation by improving quality for populations who experience disparities. The program has three main goals:
· To equip healthcare leaders with a rich understanding of the causes of disparities, the vision to implement solutions, and the strategies to transform their organization to deliver high-value health care.
· To help leaders create strategic plans or projects to advance their work in reducing disparities in a customized way, with practical benefits tailored to every organization.
· To create a professional learning and networking environment for leaders in health care to engage in peer-to-peer learning, crowdsourcing of ideas and strategies for reducing disparities, resource sharing, collaboration, and ongoing support in the form of a national DLP alumni network.
“What we have learned from working with other health care organizations for over a decade is that there is a thirst for knowledge on how to operationalize and execute on strategies to address racial and ethnic disparities, but also to be part of a community that can crowdsource ideas,” said Aswita Tan-McGrory, MBA, MSPH, Director of the Disparities Solutions Center at MGH. “Especially in this current national climate of a call to action for social justice, participating organizations create a powerful network of leaders coming together to support and learn from each other toward the common goal of eliminating disparities,” Ms. Tan-McGrory said.
“Diversity, equity, and inclusion are central to our value system at Western Sky Community Care. This program will help us translate disparities into realistic solutions that can be applied here in New Mexico,” said Western Sky President and CEO Jean Wilms. “We are encouraged by the opportunity to improve our advancement towards equity in quality healthcare.”
Since its inception in 2005 as the nation’s first hospital-based disparities center, the Disparities Solutions Center at MGH has been recognized as a national leader in addressing racial and ethnic disparities in care. In addition to fostering a movement among leaders from 203 organizations nationally and internationally through the DLP, the DSC has worked with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Office of Minority Health to design, implement, and evaluate a portfolio of quality improvement programs to reduce health disparities. In addition, the DSC has partnered with hospital leaders in quality and safety at MGH for over a decade to produce the publicly available Annual Report on Equity in Health Care Quality, which stratifies hospital data by race, ethnicity, language, and other factors to monitor for disparities, identify areas for quality improvement, and report on the progress of initiatives to eliminate disparities. DSC faculty have also played an important role in the well-recognized effort among Boston hospitals to eliminate disparities under the leadership of the Boston Public Health Commission. These experiences have uniquely positioned DSC faculty to provide training to those interested in addressing disparities through quality improvement.
The Disparities Leadership Program is jointly sponsored by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and supported by Joint Commission Resources (JCR), an affiliate of the Joint Commission.