About
What is the Goal of JUSTICE SQUARED?
JUSTICE SQUARED is a transformational learning and action collaborative to advance racially just healthcare. JUSTICE SQUARED will support teams of five from to:
1. Share power and accountability across healthcare and patients /communities experiencing healthcare inequities.
2. Engage in a guided learning and action journey to change their healthcare organization by shifting:
2.1. How we measure and account for racism (not just race)
3. Build lasting change by shifting policies and practices and building trustworthy relationships between healthcare and the communities, grounded in joy, love, and justice.
What is part of the
JUSTICE SQUARED Learning and Action Journey?
JUSTICE SQUARED teams will go on a transformation journey that includes five transformational leadership academies to build skills and relationship and five action periods between leadership academies to put the “how” into practice, supported by coaching, webinars, peer support, and virtual resources.
What Skills and Capacities will JUSTICE SQUARED Teams Build?
JUSTICE SQUARED TEAMS WILL DEVELOP:
Foundational skills around building shared leadership and accountability across healthcare and community
– Skills for understanding one’s own story and the story of the relationship between a healthcare organization and community.
– Skills for building trustworthy processes and relationships.
– Skills and practices for sharing power in the context of unequal power.
– Skills to address conflict and develop practices for open honest communication.
– Skills to understand the world from diverse perspectives.
– Skills to build a collective made up of the people and groups needed on the healthcare and community side to change the system.
Skills to understand and confront structural racism through two shifts
– Skills to identify how structural racism and other inequities are showing up in the healthcare system.
– Skills to create tangible structural change through one of two shifts:
Shift 1: How we measure and account for racism (not just race). For example:
– Are wait times much longer for people of color or for those on Medicaid compared with patients on commercial insurance?
– Is financial assistance being proactively and respectfully offered to all groups?
– Are medical debt collection practices reinforcing inequities for communities of color?
– Are catchment areas for community benefits resemble racially gerrymandered maps.
Shift 2: Removing racism from clinical, operational, and administrative diagnostics and algorithms. For example:
– Removing race from Glomerular Filtration Rate (GFR) measurement (and other examples of race-based corrections that have been demonstrated to create harm).
– Seeing whether social assessment protocols preclude some groups from receiving organ transplants by eliminating those who have greater social needsIdentifying whether protocols for where to place new healthcare sites are designed to avoid communities of color?
– Skills to shift the system through collective “all in” action cycles.
Skills to build lasting change together
– Skills to shift policies and practices in diverse political contexts.
– Skills to build shared governance and shift power for the long term.
– Strategies to shift resources.
– Skills to shift narratives.
– Skills to sustain a change process.
JUSTICE SQUARED Teams
JUSTICE SQUARED Core teams will consist of five (5) multidisciplinary team members across healthcare and community:
This core team will be asked to take the BEACON for JUSTICE Team Assessment and will use this tool throughout its journey.
How will JUSTICE SQUARED Teams Work to Shift Healthcare?
Over 150 people contributed to a design process that identified a series of powerful shifts in healthcare needed to dismantle structural racism and build a healthcare system grounded in love, joy, and justice. This inaugural cohort of JUSTICE SQUARED will focus on two of these shifts, but draw from a number of others. These two shifts are tangible, relevant, and timely, and will build a foundation for many of the others.
- Are wait times much longer for people of color or for those on Medicaid compared with patients on commercial insurance?
- Is financial assistance being proactively and respectfully offered to all groups? Are medical debt collection practices reinforcing inequities for communities of color?
- Are catchment areas for community benefits resemble racially gerrymandered maps.
SHIFT 1: Measuring and Accounting for Racism, not just Race
Where and how is racism–not just race–currently being measured in your healthcare organization? Who is trained within your healthcare organization to identify structural racism, measure it, and build strategies to improve it? Who holds and shares accountability and governance for correcting it? How is addressing structural racism part of your safety, improvement, and business strategy? Working on this shift will help you make addressing structural racism a core organizational transformation strategy.
SHIFT 2: Removing Racism from Clinical, Operational, and Administrative Diagnostics, Algorithms, and Processes
Race-based corrections and proxies for race (like insurance status) have become embedded in healthcare clinical and operational diagnostics, algorithms, and processes in ways that perpetuate racial inequities. This shift challenges us to begin to account for and eliminate the way we use race and proxies for race from our Diagnostics, Algorithms, and Processes.
- Is the way we correct for race (for example in Glomerular Filtration Rate (GFR) measurement and other examples of race-based corrections) creating disadvantage for that group?
- Are insurance verification algorithms used by the healthcare organization for accepting people into elective procedures favoring people with certain insurance types and dissuading people of color?
- Is the marketing or strategic process to identify the community where a new building will be placed deprioritizing communities with higher poverty rates who might be at the greatest need?