Centering Equity As We Work To Advance Integrated Care

At the AIMS Center, we believe that none of us is as smart as all of us. Our unique and diverse life experiences strengthen our organization and allow us to accomplish great things. Encompassed in this belief is a commitment to creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace and promoting these principles in our work and partnerships.

The health care system we operate within perpetuates long-standing social and health inequalities. Dismantling this to create an equitable¹, diverse, and inclusive culture is challenging. Our team is committed to doing the individual work of confronting our own internalized racism and biases, consistently leaning into hard conversations, learning from our failures, and persevering in our efforts to transform our institution.

Current Initiatives

Confronting Individual Bias and Racism: Staff DEI Resources and Training

The Staff DEI Training workgroup was developed to define ongoing processes for selecting DEI-related trainings and advertising learning opportunities for staff to ensure processes successfully continue beyond existence of this group. In their work thus far, the DEI Staff Training workgroup has created a standardized process for identifying and sharing DEI training resources with staff, supporting continuous learning of DEI topics in a variety of platforms, and creating a process for new staff to engage in onboarding to the DEI approaches and resources at the AIMS Center.

Transforming Institutional Policies and Practices: Recruitment and Retention Workgroup

The Recruitment and Retention workgroup was developed to evaluate and improve the AIMS Center’s outreach and hiring processes. The workgroup has partnered with UW and Departmental HR to research and implement best practices for attracting diverse candidates. In addition, they have developed policies and procedures for regularly reviewing job descriptions for exclusionary language, setting standards for screening and interviewing candidates with an equitable and inclusive lens, and including regular trainings on implicit bias and inclusive recruitment for hiring managers and search committees.

Accelerating Systemic Change: Accelerating Systemic Change Workgroup

We are committed to Accelerating Systemic Change (ASC) by centering health equity in our external communications, training offerings, and by soliciting and incorporating partner feedback. The ASC workgroup strives to meet these goals by continuously reviewing and updating standards for centering health equity in AIMS Center materials. We view all our work as an ongoing opportunity to learn and evolve our role in promoting equitable change in CoCM. Recent focus has been on transforming our evaluation tools to request partner feedback regarding health equity as well as exploring barriers to accessing CoCM training.

*We are using the following health equity definition to center our work: “Health equity is the state in which everyone has the opportunity to attain full health potential and no one is disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or any other socially defined circumstance… Health equity requires focused and sustained societal efforts to confront historical and contemporary injustices and eliminate health disparities.” This definition is built from the following resources:
Quintuple Aim (Nundy et al., 2022)
Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity (Natl Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017) ↩︎