Health Care Providers Are Hiring the Wrong People

In healthcare hiring there have long been strong prejudices about race, class and educational attainment.  Many of our conventions come from an era when healthcare was delivered primarily by doctors and nurses with elite training whose success depended mostly on content expertise. This paradigm is outdated; we now know that social, behavioral and relational factors are critical drivers of health. Thus, the new healthcare workforce needs more than biomedical knowledge; it needs diverse, empathetic team players at all levels who can support patients holistically. There has been little focus on hiring healthcare professionals with the traits needed to succeed in this new reality. This article offers an approach to finding, hiring, and retaining the diverse array of people needed to deliver the outcomes patients and provider organizations now expect.