Providing equitable access to high-quality, culturally competent patient care
At HCA Healthcare, we believe excellence in healthcare starts with a foundation of inclusion, compassion and respect for our patients and each other. We are committed to meeting the social, cultural, linguistic and spiritual needs of our patients, their families and the communities we serve.
Our commitments to our patients include advancing health equity as a system priority and reinforcing our commitment to eliminating health disparities; and ensuring access to services for patients who have limited English proficiency, are deaf or hard of hearing, are blind or have low vision or have service animals.
Equity of care
Effective healthcare is based on trust built between caregiver and patient and requires a skilled balance of clinical treatment and human compassion. Our commitment to putting patients first means we recognize and affirm the unique and intrinsic worth of each individual. This is the heart of equity of care.
Our focus areas to meet the needs of our increasingly diverse patient population include advancing health equity, access to services, equity compliance coordinator program, and pastoral and spiritual care.
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Our actions
Our Equity of Care program provides innovative, pragmatic, compassionate, patient-focused solutions and resources across our organization.
Our Access to Services team, in conjunction with its network of over 1,000 Equity Compliance Coordinators throughout our facilities, regularly reviews and updates internal policies to ensure they align with the organization’s core values and government regulations. We assist with the implementation of these policies by providing resources and training to ensure all HCA Healthcare entities service our patients and communities with culturally competent and compassionate care.
HCA Healthcare partners with qualified language services vendors to ensure every patient we serve can effectively communicate with care providers and can easily access care-related information. To ensure effective patient-provider communications, our patients, their companions, healthcare providers, and staff have access to tools that facilitate diverse language solutions and positively impact healthcare in more than 179 languages and dialects.
To advance and support cultural competence, HCA Healthcare deploys targeted education and resources to colleagues focused on compassion and instilling a more ardent commitment to our patients, their families and our communities. Through education and training, we are committed to providing equitable access to high-quality care for our patients and to overcoming barriers to culturally competent care at the language, culture and health literacy level.
HCA Healthcare is actively working to advance data collection and analysis efforts to guide and support our goal of reducing health disparities and advancing health equity. As the nation’s largest private provider of healthcare, we have the unique opportunity to shape the conversation with our data and insights.
The HCA Healthcare Health Equity Council and Patient Advisory Group analyze data related to patient outcomes, explore opportunities to address disparities within the walls of our hospitals. Additionally, these groups are pursuing partnerships with outside organizations to address inequities related to maternal health, cardiovascular outcomes and cancer screenings for communities of color.
While spiritual support is always a matter of patient choice, it is our belief that excellent hospitals provide pastoral and spiritual care resources in a culturally and spiritually competent manner for those patients who desire it. HCA Healthcare maintains a large network of professionally certified and accredited chaplains and qualified pastoral and spiritual care providers who provide spiritual care for the whole organization: inclusive of our patients, their companions, and our colleagues and the communities we serve.