Armond Kinsey is vice president and chief diversity officer with Atlantic Health System.
He talked about why the health system’s commitment to staff diversity is also a commitment to care.
“We saw the disproportionate impact in Hispanic and African American communities as it relates to COVID, across the country and here in New Jersey. Two things come to mind when we think about that: communication and access. … We do know that there was a lack in communication in some communities because things weren’t being translated into certain languages. The CDC had information on their website available in multiple languages, but, at the local level, not all medical centers had that available. So, in some communities, we saw a three- to four-day lag time between people understanding what was social distancing, what was hand hygiene, because it wasn’t available in their preferred written and spoken language.”
