It has been a challenging working environment for every profession in the last 20 months but none more so than in hospitals and for healthcare professionals.
Trying to keep the show on the road while also being mindful of employees’ health and wellbeing has been to the forefront at the Bon Secours Hospital in Glasnevin, who have actively been working on their diversity and inclusion programme.
Mike Tonery, chief executive of Glasnevin Bon Secours, says people have had a lot of stress over the last 20 months, and from a professional and personal perspective that can take its toll.
“They really put the shoulder to the wheel and rose to the challenge and got the wheels back on track to support private patients and to facilitate and help out where we can with our public hospitals,” he says.
In the midst of all that, in the last 12 months, they have introduced diversity and inclusion training and encouraged a large number of staff to attend workshops with an external facilitator.
“We try to live what we action in terms of diversity, to treat everyone with respect, and consideration. We have up to 25 different nationalities working in our hospitals and we always try to apply professional courtesy during all our interactions with our staff.
“It’s a very open culture, no blame, and we value the differences and similarities between different groups of people. We have different days for different nationalities, we also have Pride week.
“It’s about sitting down and trying to understand the conscious and unconscious biases, how they affect our decisions, to promote active listening and engagement with others and it’s about getting the balance between uniformity and unity. It’s also about recognising the values everyone brings to the table and how unique each individual is. That’s what is coming out of those workshops,” he says.
“We are a people organisations and people are to hospitals what blood is to the human system, it’s a people-led service. How our patients are treated reflects on how our staff are treated. To live by our values and to ensure we deliver exceptional care is the cornerstone of what we do every day, so we need to make sure we live up to our mission.”
Without a good diversity and inclusion strategy you get division, he adds.
"We'd be concerned about areas of the hospital working in silos and not working as a team. People can be misinterpreted and that can affect staff morale if you don't make people more aware of others' needs and what's important to them," he says.
“We will try to deepen our mutual trust for each other, and we won’t allow prejudice to prevail. It will create a stronger team with better objectives and focus on achieving our mission and provide compassionate care to the sick and dying and their families.
“That is what we feel we will get by having that in place. We aim for our core values to be at the heart of our interactions with patients, families, staff and the community we serve in north Dublin,” he says.
“There is a shortage of healthcare workers in Ireland at the moment and we couldn’t survive without a broad diversity of staff in the facility – we have up to 25 different nationalities here. It would be a completely different model if we weren’t able to get those people working together on the one page. It’s a key factor.”