Diversity Leadership: Key Findings from the NCHL National Diversity Demonstration Project

The National Center for Health Care Leadership's diversity leadership demonstration project is the first to employ pre-post intervention assessment of system-wide diversity and cultural competence change initiatives. The project emphasized collaboration between researchers and professionals to build the evidence base for best practices in strategic diversity management and the delivery of culturally and linguistically appropriate care and employed a systems approach to drive sustainable change. Assessments and interventions focused on five aspects of strategic diversity management and culturally and linguistically appropriate care: diversity leadership, strategic human resource management, organizational climate, diversity climate and patient cultural competency. Two health systems participated in the demonstration project, each providing an intervention hospital and a control hospital. The pre-post intervention assessment battery evaluated the impact of the intervention on organizational competencies, individual competencies, human resource outcomes, and patient and financial outcomes. Results generally point to greater pre-post improvement at the intervention as compared to the control hospital in both hospital systems as well as greater pre-post change in one intervention hospital as compared to the other at the individual, team and organizational levels. Results support adoption of the systems approach to build sustainable change in diversity management practices and culturally and linguistically appropriate patient care delivery. Factors hypothesized to explain the findings including leadership support at the system and hospital levels, employee engagement, competing priorities, integration with other change initiatives, among others.