When a tech device gets old, companies make the old tech uncomfortable or inconvenient, all but ensuring we’ll upgrade to the latest device.
Nneka Sederstrom hopes she and other Twin Cities health care equity leaders can make the old way of doing health care uncomfortable enough to reinvent how health care systems serve people and the broader community.
“We’re comfortable with the racism, we’re comfortable with the oppression. We’re comfortable in this space of just continuing to highlight the problems without actually doing something differently,” said Sederstrom, the chief health equity officer at Hennepin Healthcare. “Bukata (Hayes, vice president of racial and health equity and chief equity officer at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota) and I believe that you can build something new and then make this (situation) so uncomfortable that you gotta migrate over.”
Sederstrom said key to achieving that is a recent reorganization of health equity work by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, which partners with Hennepin Healthcare on several programs. Blue Cross announced last month it would combine its racial and health equity integration and policy and communication teams with the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging team and the Center for Prevention, creating the Center for Racial and Health Equity. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota sponsors the Race and Health equity beat at MinnPost, but does not weigh in on editorial decisions.
What prompted the center’s creation, according to Hayes, was the fact that the teams, though all working on race and health equity, found their work “at times fragmented.”
“We as a team knew we could drive more impact (and) be better if we figured out how to address (this) fragmentation,” Hayes said. “It was from that mindset that we moved forward to create this unified existence for the work here at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.”
The center operates under four pillars – embed, partner, transform and heal – which Hayes said helps drive decisions about the work.
The center will also continue to specifically engage with various external partnerships, including the Birth Justice Collaborative, a group of community organizations partnered with Hennepin County focused on promoting/improving Black and Native American maternal and child health outcomes. Additional partnerships the center will continue include partnerships with community coalitions that focus on various issues, including tobacco cessation and food sovereignty.
“We won’t have a savior mentality when engaging with (communities),” Hayes said. “We will have a really humble posture of listening, learning, partnering, and acting.”
Sederstrom agreed a savior mentality isn’t helpful. “The problem with health disparities and health inequities is (that) it’s not that there’s an issue with the people, it’s the system,” said Sederstrom, PhD, MPH, MA, FCCP, FCCM. The center “is set up to look at the systemic issues to create opportunities for people to just be able to thrive normally.”
“(The center gets) that the system has to change at its fundamental core. It’s not enough to just say, ‘Oh, I wanna do this one program. We’ll get some media press on this other program and somebody will give us a gold star,’” Sederstrom said.
Sederstrom said Blue Cross is supporting Hennepin Healthcare’s health equity summit in November, as well as its Talent Garden programs, including “Youth with Stethoscopes” events, where children from various communities of color are given the opportunity to experience and explore careers in health care. The Talent Garden also offers internships and mentoring.
“This year, I think we’ll hit a thousand kids that have gone through our Talent Garden program and we are looking to expand it into a bigger, more intentional academic training from kindergarten through medical school to build the workforce of tomorrow that’s racially and ethnically diverse,” Sederstrom said, adding that one Somali American from Minnesota was recently accepted to a seven-year bachelor’s degree to medical school program at Rutgers University. “We got her connected, we made the introductions. We helped address the barriers that she (was facing) and she got in.”
Deanna Pistono
Deanna Pistono is MinnPost’s Race & Health Equity fellow. Follow her on Twitter @deannapistono or email her at dpistono@minnpost.com.
