Company overview

Learn more about how our vast array of solutions and best-in-class technologies are powerfully serving the healthcare workforce. 

Our brands

They say you can’t choose your family – but we did. We think you will, too. Our family of companies can tackle problems of any size, big or small. 

Our role in healthcare

Learn more about how we use our unrivaled staffing experience, best-in-class technology, and strategic consultation to help your organization succeed.

Executive leadership

Meet our team of executive leaders who are guiding our efforts to make life better for providers, patients, and healthcare organizations. 

Core values

See how our core values guide all our business decisions and drive us to find new ways to make life better for those we serve in the healthcare industry.

Community impact

Learn more about how we give back to communities both near and far through fundraisers, team activities, medical missions, and more. 

Solutions overview

See how we’re delivering customized workforce solutions that are doing right by our healthcare partners and improving how healthcare is done. 

Technology

Check out our suite of high-tech solutions that perfectly complement our high-touch approach to a future-ready workforce. 

Advisory services

We’re creating customized solutions that support cost containment, drive meaningful results, and pave the way for a more successful future. 

Physicians

See how our experts draw from the industry’s largest locums database to deliver customized solutions such as locum tenens, permanent placement, and telehealth.

Advanced practice

Get insights into how our team of APP-specific experts use in-house credentialing and licensing to deliver the right candidate to your facility.

Allied health

Learn more about the process we use to connect your organization with qualified therapists, technicians, technologists, assistants, and more.

Nurses

Find out what makes our nurse staffing truly stand out in the industry, and how we’re constantly looking for new ways to make the process smoother.

Telehealth

Tap into the nation’s largest network and deepest specialty bench of multi-state license providers to keep your virtual care strategies on track.

Blog

Visit our blog to get workforce insights, catch the latest company updates, and hear important stories from within the healthcare industry.

Resources

Get industry insights, workforce strategies, and more from our resource section. Each video, article, and tool has been created with your success in mind. 

Careers overview

Get the details on how a career at CHG fast-tracks your success and lets you play a role in helping 25 million patients receive care each year.

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Locations

Get all the details about our various locations nationwide. We have expanded our operations to better serve the needs of the healthcare community.

Benefits

Browse our benefit and wellness programs and learn how our team handpicks the best options to support you as a whole person.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion

Learn about the DEI goals we’re embracing to make our company¬–and healthcare industry at large–a better home for everyone.

Learning and development

See how our award-winning team of trainers can help you develop new skills and pursue the career path that makes you feel the most alive.

Employee stories

Check out stories from our people’s lives that highlight how CHG supports personal growth and helps you make a positive impact in the world.

Flexibility

Learn more about how our commitment to workplace flexibility puts you in the best position to be happy, comfortable, and effective.

Talent network

Visit our Talent network page to apply for a job, communicate with our talent acquisition team, or refer someone else for a job at CHG.

Recruiting process

Learn more about our hiring process and how we seek out the best opportunities for you to make an immediate impact.

Addressing bias and strengthening diversity in the healthcare workplace

How can healthcare administrators attract more diverse candidates and increase diversity among their staff, and why is it important to do so? Risha Grant, a diversity and inclusion expert, shares best practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the healthcare industry.

What is diversity and inclusion? 

Risha Grant

Grant describes diversity as a basic fact of anyone’s identity. “It’s who you are, it’s your race, it’s your ethnicity, it’s your age, your sexual orientation, it’s your religion,” she explains. “But it’s also your food preferences, your clothing choices, how you rock your hairstyle. It is who you are, point blank, period.”

Grant points out that some people may feel compelled to “close the door” on their diversity when they go to work each morning because they don’t feel like their diversity is valued there. This may look like a quiet coworker who doesn’t seem to contribute — and the way to usher them in is through inclusivity.

To be inclusive means creating an environment that is welcoming and helpful to everyone. “Who are you sitting next to on a daily basis that you can teach to play the game, to be part of the team?” is the question Grant suggests we all start asking. 

Understanding different types of bias

When it comes to practicing inclusivity among diverse sets of people, there’s a chance you may encounter bias, which comes in the forms of unconscious bias and validated bias. “The most pervasive issue that is affecting us today [is] unconscious biases, and not just [from] us as individuals, but [from] us within our companies, our culture,” Grant remarks.

Unconscious bias is a basic process in which our brains go on “autopilot,” taking in information about people around us and using it to navigate interactions in our day-to-day lives. This is called a bias synapse, or “BS.” There is also validated bias, which comes from experiencing actual discrimination or prejudice because of one’s diverse qualities. 

DO MORE: 6 ways to develop an authentic DEI program for your healthcare organization

Addressing bias to support DEI efforts

To interrupt unconscious bias and increase diversity in our workplace cultures, Grant has come up with a three-step process to help individuals identify, own, and confront their biases. 

1. Identify your bias

The first step to disrupting bias is to identify your personal bias synapse, or the “real and unconscious bias.” Grant urges people to try exercises to identify who they may have a bias against, like imagining who you wouldn’t want to sit next to on an airplane and why. The answer to that question is where one’s bias may lay, and that bias is built up and reinforced in our lives by four main drivers: personal experience, friends, family, and the media. 

Personal experience comes from the interactions one has personally with different people, which may be positive or negative. Relationships with friends and family, Grant informs us, impact what kind of people we like, trust, or accept into our communities.

Adding to this, the media we consume can convey messaging that impacts our basic understanding of how other people live. As Grant points out, media-based misunderstandings can vary from harmless perceptions to harmful and limiting assumptions — keeping people in boxes that they don’t belong in. 

2. Own your bias

Once you have identified your bias, you have to own it. Grant’s advice is simple: Say it out loud so you can hear how unreasonable it really sounds. After this, she says, owning the bias is simple because we can draw on lessons we learned as children — “You don’t call people names or talk about them behind their backs.” That means making an effort to work and play well with others, things most of us have practiced since we were young. 

3. Confront your bias

After identifying and owning up to bias, we must finally confront it, but this isn’t as difficult as it may sound. According to Grant, this means practicing radical acceptance — “allowing people to be who they are and welcoming and embracing people for their full humanity, including your own, without any BS.”

It’s a continuation of owning bias and is a way to start making lasting relationships in different communities. “Meet people where they are, diversify conferences and locations,” she advises. That can look like creating partnerships with businesses and other cultural hubs in communities you want to connect with. 

ASK YOURSELF: Questions to help healthcare facilities as they focus on diversity and inclusion

How to address bias in the healthcare workplace

When encountering bias in the workplace, Grant says it is important to be real, honest, and transparent about biases that may be felt by coworkers or members of your team — identity, own, and confront the bias.

It’s also vital to think about how biases can impact the people you serve. Bias, Grant says, can come across to patients, and it can impact whether or not those patients trust a healthcare provider to fully address their health concerns. Reminding others of this simple fact could be enough to show them the importance of owning and confronting their bias and how it ripples out to affect others.

For this reason, Grant says it’s always important to address bias in the moment — or at least correct it. For example, if you notice someone being routinely excluded at work, you can make the effort to include them. 

The importance of diverse recruitment in healthcare

Not owning up to bias, as Grant points out, can cost a lot. “The discrimination lawsuits are still one of the number one lawsuits filed against companies on a yearly basis. You have to remember that the price of inclusion is a lot cheaper than the price of exclusion.” 

Understanding bias in a professional setting can look like examining where your company is hiring from. Grant points out that we’re prone to hiring people who look and sound like us or who have similar backgrounds and experiences. In turn, we may overlook and underappreciate the experiences and skills offered by people from different backgrounds. Remaining stuck in these kinds of hiring habits can impact a company’s ability to attract diverse candidates. 

WEBINAR: Healthcare leader insights on diversity, equity, and inclusion

Disrupting bias through increased diversity in healthcare

“Diverse markets can be missed opportunities for a lot of companies,” Grant says. “You all are out there recruiting. You have got to look at diversity as part of that recruitment campaign because the world is diverse.” 

Patients rely on healthcare practitioners to help them with their health concerns. But if they’re met with providers who carry a bias against them for any reason, they may not get the care they need — and not only does that impact lives, but it also impacts the livelihoods of providers and the success of the places they work. 

Bias can be disrupted by simply creating more visibility, such as including diversity in advertisements, so everyone knows they’re welcome. But perhaps most importantly, Grant says, is recruiting diverse people to work with you. According to Grant, diverse companies are “twice as likely to meet or exceed financial targets, three times as likely to be high performing, six times more likely to be innovative and agile, and eight times as likely to achieve better business outcomes.” 

Working to disrupt unconscious bias is not just an important way to keep diverse staff at your workplace. It can also spur better service for your patients that stems from diverse perspectives.

CHG can help your organization increase its diversity with the doctors, nurses, and allied professionals you need to provide the best care for your community. Contact us by phone at 866.588.5996.

About the author

Alisa Tank

Alisa Tank is a communications coordinator at CHG Healthcare. She’s passionate about making a difference in the lives of others. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, road trips, and exploring Utah’s desert landscapes.

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