By building strong partnerships across nursing and health equity, health system leaders can create a strong foundation for effective social determinants of health (SDOH) screening. This roundtable explores expert insights from Novant Health and Virtua Health on how cross-functional collaboration between nursing and health equity teams has elevated their SDOH assessment and intervention pathways.
Key Takeaways
Engage Nursing Staff to Become Health Equity Champions Creating education opportunities for front-line nurses to connect the dots on health equity can enable them to leverage and disseminate that knowledge into their own clinical areas. One example from Novant highlighted their “Transcultural Health Nursing Network,” a health equity-focused cohort learning experience that is cultivating advocates across the system. Similarly, WellSpan’s “Special Projects Nurses” program engages semi-retired or retired nurses to drive ongoing work with community partners.
Securing Front-Line Nursing Buy-In: Emphasizing the patient-centered ‘Why?’ of SDoH screening implementation was a helpful strategy to facilitate buy-in from nursing staff that are tasked with SDoH screening at admission. Using mantras tied to health system mission and patient outcomes can be successful in mitigating pushback from those who see it as just “more questions to ask.”
Setting Nursing Staff Up for Success: To empower nurses in the implementation of SDoH strategy, participants noted that they need to be equipped with the necessary resources to relay next steps to patients. In order to successfully navigate SDoH screenings, nursing staff must have the ability to not only gather information but understand next steps for positive screens.