Today, more and more companies are promoting diversity. They have recognized that diversity delivers a number of benefits that include an enhanced capacity to attend to the needs of diverse client groups. The helping profession has particularly benefited from diversity (Baskin, 2016). The practitioners in this profession attend to the mental, physical, spiritual and emotional health needs of individuals and communities. Thanks to diversity, these practitioners have been able to address the needs of clients from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. The benefits that these practitioners have enjoyed are clear indication that diversity helps to drive service delivery in the helping profession.
As noted above, diversity has shaped the delivery of services in the helping profession. One of the functions that diversity has served is that it has bolstered acceptance and respect (Erez et al., 2013). Cultural diversity plays a particularly important role in encouraging professionals to respect and accept all the clients that they attend to, regardless of their cultural background. Diversity also fosters unity and harmony. When professionals from different backgrounds come together and join forces, they are able to adopt a unified approach that focuses on the wellbeing of clients. For example, a team of physicians whose members are drawn from different ethnic and racial groups are able to better serve the needs of communities whose composition is diverse and complex.
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Individuals prefer the company of their own kind. For example, a white doctor may desire to be posted in a majority white neighborhood. While this is not necessarily wrong, it hinders the efforts of minority communities to obtain are. This is where diversity comes in. Thanks to diversity, interactions among professionals and communities with different racial and ethnic characteristics are made possible (Stankunas et al., 2016). Diversity allows professionals to move beyond tolerance. It empowers them to embrace and actively champion for integration and fairness in the delivery of care. Diversity would allow a white physician to agree to serve in a facility situated in a poor black neighborhood. This example underscores the role of diversity in facilitating service delivery.
Support from communities is one of the forces that allow members of the helping profession to improve the quality of care that they deliver (Hibbard & Greene, 2013). It is difficult for an ethnically or racially homogenous group of professionals to win the support of a community. For example, a purely white group of practitioners would struggle in their efforts to engage with and obtain the support of communities. This changes when this group embraces diversity. Through diversity, professionals are able to penetrate cultural barriers and create rapport with communities. Teams of professionals that are composed of members from different ethnic and racial communities are better equipped to understand and address the needs of different client populations. It is for this reason that the helping professions should strive to develop diverse workforces.
In the United States, minority communities lag behind as regards access to medical services (Barr, 2014). Members of this communities lack medical insurance and stay in neighborhoods which lack well equipped and sufficiently-staffed facilities. Successive American governments that have failed to invest in the welfare of these communities are primarily to blame. However, healthcare professionals also receive blame for failing to direct their efforts at these communities. Diversity promises to fix this problem. As already noted, diversity encourages members of the helping professions to respect and embrace other cultures. As they do this, they enhance access to care for communities that have historically been marginalized.
In conclusion, the role of diversity in shaping the work and experiences of members of the helping professions cannot be overstated. Through diversity, it is possible for these individuals to develop tolerance and embrace different cultures. Diversity also enables these professionals to improve quality of care and to focus on minority communities. Diversity also plays a vital role in enabling the professionals to gain support from the communities with which they work. Given the important function that diversity serves, there is need for the different helping professions to recruit from different ethnic and racial groups.
References
Barr, D. A. (2014). Health Disparities in the United States: Social Class, Race, Ethnicity and Health. Baltimore, MD: JHU Press.
Baskin, C. (2016). Strong Helpers’ Teachings: The Value of Indigenous Knowledge in the Helping Professions. Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
Erez, M., Lisak, A., Harush, R., Gikson, E., Nouri, R. & Shokef, E. (2013). Going Global:Developing Management Students’ Intelligence and Global Identity in Culturally Diverse Virtual Teams. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 12 (3), 330- 355.
Hibbard, J. H. & Greene, J. (2013). What the Evidence Shows about Patient Activation: Better Health Outcomes and Patient Experiences; Fewer Data on Costs. HealthAffairs, 32 (2), 207-214.
Stankunas, M., Soares, J., Sandhu, S., Macassa, G., Avery, M. & Czabanowska, K. (2016). Components for “Good Practice” in Healthcare for Immigrants: Comparison of Opinions from Swedish and Lithuanian Experts. Mid Swedish Journal of Public Health, 1 (1), DOI: 10.13183/msjph.v1i1.170
