How Atlantic Health’s diversity chief seeks to provide ‘culturally competent care’

Less than a year after Armond Kinsey took on the role of VP, chief talent and diversity officer for Atlantic Health System, the Covid-19 pandemic hit the New York tri-state area.

Kinsey immediately turned his attention to keeping talent at one of New Jersey’s largest systems safe, as well as supporting the patients seeking care at its medical centers.

The nonprofit health system, headquartered in Morristown, NJ, employs 18,000 team members as well as 4,800 physicians, and serves neighborhoods where more than one in 10 residents speak Spanish at home. And in recent years, community health assessments for Atlantic Health’s catchment area recorded unfavorable health indicators for conditions such as heart disease and diabetes, which heighten patients’ risk for Covid-19.

“We understood right away that there [were] some demographics that did not trust healthcare systems,” Kinsey told Healthcare Brew. “So our goal at that point was, ‘How do we work with those communities that may have a distrust in the healthcare system to make sure they're informed?’”

Ensuring equitable care

During the pandemic, Kinsey and a few other Atlantic Health executives zeroed in on community outreach to ensure residents felt comfortable coming to them, “whether it’s just for education, testing, or a vaccine,” he said.

Recognizing that many patients “trusted their rabbi, their pastor, their priest,” for example, Atlantic Health partnered with faith-based organizations to make sure these residents were informed about the coronavirus.

Kinsey and his colleagues also developed walk-up testing sites to reach patients without cars as well as initiatives to work toward vaccine equity at a time when white and wealthy patients were accessing Covid-19 shots at higher rates than Black, Latino, and low-income people.

The health system produced public service announcements about the vaccine geared toward Black and Latino audiences, featuring Atlantic Health physicians from those groups. They shared such communications not only externally but also through more informal channels like WhatsApp messenger.

Language barriers also negatively affected inoculation rates among non-English speakers, so Kinsey spearheaded other measures to improve messaging—and the subsequent vaccination trend.

After noticing Atlantic Health’s website was primarily in English, his department helped develop a version in Spanish, which is the most widely spoken first language after English among the system’s patients.

His team also partnered with a language services company called Alta to assess the foreign language skills of the system’s employees and train them as interpreters.

In order to obtain licensure, New Jersey hospitals must provide interpreting and translation services. Historically Atlantic Health has relied on external partners for this, Kinsey said. While these partners are valuable, “one thing we know from patients is that they prefer to have that [interpreter] in person.”

In addition to reducing costs, having in-house interpreters “creates a much better dynamic and patient experience,” Kinsey said. “It helps us improve quality, because that patient feels like they can trust that provider [and] the service is much better.”

Starting with diverse talent

Because he oversees both diversity and talent for Atlantic Health, Kinsey is in a unique position to be forward-thinking about hiring culturally competent workers, or those who meet the social, cultural, and linguistic needs of patients, he said. If the system is expanding to a specific region of New Jersey, for example, he wants to understand the talent market, the schools that could serve as a pipeline for talent, and the level of diversity at those schools.

“We’ve been very intentional about who we’re partnering with,” he said, citing the system’s partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities that have nursing programs as well as minority professional organizations like the National Medical Association, Black Nurses Association, and Hispanic Nurses Association.

Atlantic Health has also started holding open houses, dinners, and receptions to recruit potential talent, particularly in areas where there’s demand for more staff, like nursing. When the organization attends recruiting events geared toward specific minority groups, Kinsey’s team makes sure members of that group are in attendance, he said.

“This statement is used a lot, but representation matters,” Kinsey said. “So people want to know that you’re not just talking the talk, but that you’re walking the walk. Having our own people there to represent the organization, I think, is really important.”

Though Kinsey expects the recent Supreme Court decision that ended affirmative action to affect Atlantic Health’s talent pipeline a few years down the road, he remains hopeful that young people from underrepresented groups will continue to seek out opportunities in healthcare. Going forward, he said it might be valuable to connect with promising candidates as early as high school, so prospective healthcare professionals understand the full spectrum of what’s available to them in the industry.

“​​I do think organizations have an opportunity here to step up and help people meet their dreams and career goals,” Kinsey said.