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Hello DHS,
Today I want to talk about Service Equity as a new core value here in the department.
Remember, we have two new core values – Innovation and Service Equity – that we’re adding
onto the five that have been our tradition for a long time. We’ve talked about diversity
and inclusion as part of our core value of Respect for many years, and we should continue
that discussion.
Service Equity is a stand-alone for me because it is about elevating the work we do around
this area from a conversation into action. It’s really about focusing both internally
on what we do to provide an environment that is welcoming, that is fair and promotes equal
opportunity for all of our staff, and it’s about what we do about our service delivery
to our clients to ensure that the outcomes we want for people, we are achieving for ALL
people. And if not, we’re taking a look at why not.
You know, diversity can be defined very broadly. It’s about race and ethnicity, but it’s
also about so much more. We have geographic diversity across our state. We have diversity
in terms of socio-economic status in the people we’re serving. We have people of ability
and disability in our service environment, so I hope you take this conversation about
Service Equity to that next level – both in terms of the breadth and its scope and
in terms of that move from conversation to action.
What action am I taking in this area right now? One of the things I’m doing is I have
asked Gloria Anderson to step up and be the Director of a new Office of Equity and Multicultural
Services here in the department. She’s going to be sending a message out to all staff describing
what it is she’s doing and the team she’s working with. You need to know that the legislature
endorsed this as a priority for the agency and gave us a couple of additional staff and
resources so that we could really move ourselves forward in this area, and I’m looking forward
to that.
The second thing we’ve done is we’re taking a closer look at our data for our clients.
We’ve taken our key performance measures and we’ve produced for the first time this
year, in partnership with the Oregon Health Authority, a State of Equity report: http://www.oregon.gov/OHA/omhs/soe/docs/state-of-equity-report.pdf?ga=t
We’ve looked at things, like in child welfare our conversation about equity, disproportionality
and disparity and really highlighted where we have room to grow. But we’ve taken that
to all program areas in the department.
So for example in the area of long-term care, we don’t have very many disparities and
we also found that we’ve got a lot of data missing that we need to be collecting. That’s
something that we’re working on and working toward, but take a look at the report.
The third thing we’re doing is embedding this work into action as part of our scorecard
and our management map, looking at our outcomes internally as a department and what it is
we’re doing to make this department more diverse and inclusive, and we’re also looking
externally at those service outcomes to clients and making sure that as we’re measuring
face-to-face contact, measuring people who are free of abuse in licensed care settings,
that we’re also looking at those things through the lens of race/ethnicity and difference.
Please help me move from conversation to action. I’m looking forward to more conversation,
though, about what that means to you and your work and what it means to you about the place
in which you work here in the agency. Thanks for thinking about this as one of our new
core values and thanks for thinking about how you can put that new core value into action.
Have a great week.
~ Erinn