The PDC's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts are led by Dr. Erica Taylor, assistant professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and PDC Associate Chief Medical Officer. Our primary goals are to create a coordinated strategy across Duke Health to provide equitable care to patients and create an environment of inclusion and belonging for caregivers and trainees.
Click each of the below activities to view more details about our efforts.
DEI Activities
In an effort to create a more personalized and specific approach to healthcare, we created a new way of reviewing the experiences of different patient groups by including information like:
- Gender
- Geography
- Race
- Ethnicity
This information was collected and housed in a platform that individual users or leaders can regularly access to identify any differences in patient experience to determine better ways to treat and interact with patients from different demographic sub groups.
What has been done so far: Created a guide on the utility and application of this tool
Of additional significance, these efforts:
- Align with the DUHS implementation of DEI metrics for co-management agreements
In order to ensure that we recruit diverse medical talent, we worked to imbue the recruitment processes with tools to ensure the processes used by our search committees operate are underpinned with fair and just standards.
Examples of these tools include:
- Job Description Availability
- Compliance Considerations
- Behavior-Based Interview Questions
- Outreach mechanisms for diverse populations (internal and external)
What we've accomplished so far: the development of a translatable instructional session on applying equity to PDC provider search committees
The PDC's DEI efforts have been represented at a number of cross-entity collaborations for DEI at Duke including the following:
- Racial Equity Advisory Council (Infrastructure & Policy) | Duke University
- APP Leadership Institute | Duke University School of Medicine
- Moments to Movement (M2M) | Duke Health=
- Clinical Enterprise Strategic Plan | Duke Health
- Executive Leadership Team (Aligned Strategy Development) | Private Diagnostic Clinic
- Leadership Retreats | Duke University
Dr. Taylor represents PDC to serve as the physician representative on the leadership team for APPLI. This opportunity came as a surprise and is a very interesting endeavor, backed by Johnson & Johnson but housed at Duke, allowing APPs to form a team, design a project, and undergo a leadership program that empowers them to address health disparities. She is interested in having the PDC support a team. Here is a link to the program: https://sites.duke.edu/appli/
Dr. Taylor met with each of the department chairs in one-on-one meetings to discuss DEI. The goal was to synthesize common themes and action items to be presented back to the PDC Board and chairs. The resulting data points will be the focus of many of our efforts to come.
A critical tenet of achieving an inclusive healthcare environment is having a diverse workforce. For the PDC, that includes our providers and members.
Over the last several months, we have worked with PDC’s Medical Staff Recruitment (MSR) team to identify opportunities to educate search committees who recruit new providers on basic principles of conducting more equitable processes. These tactics range from casting a wider net—for example targeting underrepresented in medicine (URiM) minorities and gender diversity, to standardizing the questions asked of each applicant and making job descriptions more explicit and accessible to committee members.
The timing of these efforts was well placed as the PDC is at an all-time high with the number of PDC physician and advanced practice provider (APP) searches for growing Duke’s physician practice. As of early 2022, PDC’s MSR team estimated more than 200 active searches for new provider positions, which includes both physicians and advanced practice providers (APPs).
In partnership with PDC'd Medical Staff Recruitment team and invested provider stakeholders, we are educating PDC members who lead and/or serve on search committees as the designated "DEI search advisors,” to prepare them for the intricacies of conducting equitable and inclusive searches. Our goal is to build a team that is skilled in and committed to search equity, representing Duke and PDC values.
Our PDC DEI lead was honored to be part of the program team launching this new endeavor with the PDC leadership. This is a wonderful example of the PDC / Duke Health investing in the development of our staff members. When we look at the composition of staff across various levels, we are often struck by the "sticky floor" that many experience in complex healthcare organizations. This program provides a template to address this phenomenon and give talented individuals an opportunity to grow while working at Duke. I am proud of our staff members who applied and were selected for this pilot program through their own merits and clinical leadership support. We will be able to learn from this pilot program and create future endeavors that provide further opportunity.
The PDC has supported opportunities to increase access to vaccines by bringing them into communities that typically would not have easy access to it. Often these are minority communities.
PDC has completed a pilot of offering inclusive skin tone bandages throughout PDC clinics. Our hope to continue to expand their availability to more patients.
Studies have shown a national trend of data which correlates race and negative descriptors used by providers in patient documentation, which suggesting racial bias. Because of these findings, we turned our attention to opportunities to ensure our providers were made aware of these trends and to be mindful of them in their own patient interactions.
Learn more by reading the following article:
The PDC Women's Network was created to provide a forum for women's issues in the workplace and to facilitate networking and support systems for the women within our organization. The group held its first and highly successful, digital event in March 2022, which included a panel of female leaders representing a range of professions within healthcare, who spoke on challenges and victories within the workforce, and provided a forum for questions and networking.
DEI Timeline Overview
