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Telling the Stories of Equity and Anti-Racism in Healthcare
Overview
Seattle Children’s is a world-renowned pediatric hospital system nestled in the Pacific Northwest. Driven by their values of compassion, excellence, integrity, collaboration, equity, and innovation, Seattle Children’s aims to provide hope, care, and cures to help every child live the healthiest and most fulfilling life possible.
Challenge
In early 2021, Seattle Children’s Board of Trustees created a committee to oversee an independent review of the organization’s efforts to combat systemic racism and promote equity. While dedicated workforce members were doing equity-focused work in the years prior, this review marked the beginning of a systematic effort to dismantle racism within the hospital system. They aimed to ensure that all families could access excellent and equitable care for their children, build a workforce representative of the patients seen at Seattle Children’s, and set an example in the pediatric health care space overall.
From this review, the Health Equity and Anti-Racism (HEAR) Action Plan was developed to guide the organization’s efforts, commit to specific actions, track progress, and report out to workforce members, patients and families, and the broader community.
Driven by the desire to improve transparency and accountability specific to health equity and anti-racism efforts, Seattle Children’s began to measure and track progress towards a set of eight outcomes outlined in the HEAR Action Plan. In the spring of 2022, Children’s published its first progress report. While comprehensive, these early reports were long and complex, lacked creativity, and did not center on the stories of workforce members or patient and family experiences. Additionally, the reports were a huge lift and allocation of resources for Seattle Children’s internal communications department.
Work
Minerva Strategies joined forces with creative agency, Poché Design Studio, to develop a new style and approach to sharing Seattle Children’s journey that focused on the primary audiences of this work: workforce members and patients and families. Our multi-disciplined team of storytellers, project managers, public health pros, and graphic designers partnered closely with Seattle Children’s People and Culture Communications Team to imagine what a better more audience-centered report would look like and bring it to life. Over the course of five months, our teams:
- Interviewed stakeholders, leaders, and workforce members about Seattle Children’s health equity and anti-racism journey and past reporting processes;
- Developed air-tight project management practices to guide our teams’ efforts, track report progress and timelines, and set and communicate expectations;
- Captured the stories of staff on the frontlines of implementing and measuring health equity work as well as patient families;
- Designed a new, dynamic health equity and anti-racism landing page and downloadable PDF report featuring workforce and patient stories and new data visualizations, and;
- Created and shared process documentation and tools that allow Seattle Children’s teams to update the HEAR outcome measures over the following months.
Explore the Health Equity and Anti-Racism landing page | Download the PDF (English or Spanish)
The new Health Equity and Anti-Racism landing page prominently features perspectives from staff and patient families.
Result
A brand-new landing page dedicated to Seattle Children’s Health Equity and Anti-Racism efforts went live in late December. The landing page—which now serves as the annual report itself—featured dynamic design and improved user experience intended to draw audiences into the material and feel curious and excited to learn more. It also highlighted three captivating stories of equity work in action, including a conversation with a patient family told in both English and Spanish, a first for this report.
In the month following the launch of the HEAR annual report, the new landing page was viewed more than 2,600 times—a 130% increase over last year’s results—by more than 1,400 unique users.
In addition to the spectacular results in report viewership, the Seattle Children’s team felt supported and confident in the report’s success through the close partnership with Minerva Strategies and Poché Design Studio.
"Minerva’s team quickly earned my trust and confidence with their very competent project management, and their writing embodied Children’s brand and voice so well that my leaders could not discern their writing from our internal team writing. We are so happy with the final product! It finally conveys the impact in a compelling and people-centered way that had eluded us before.”
Erin Murphy
Seattle Children's