ASCP Initiative to Focus on Developing Sustainable, Diverse Workforce

As workplace diversity continues to grow as a topic of importance in today’s healthcare environment, there is a need for increased awareness of how pathology and laboratory medicine can contribute. Because of this need, ASCP has launched our Diversity & Inclusion initiative that will both educate our members and increase their awareness for the need to develop sustainable, diverse workforces in order to provide better patient care.

ASCP Past President Melissa P. Upton, MD, FASCP, is one of the leaders of this new initiative, and explains that diversity and inclusion is critical to both the success of the laboratory workforce as well as the Society. People, she says, want to work for and belong to organizations that look like them. “Our longevity as a group, as an organization, requires us to be inclusive,” Dr. Upton says. “We have a lot of members from diverse populations, but are they making it into our leadership ranks? Do we invite them to the table? Do we mentor and sponsor their advancement?”

One of the key goals of this new initiative is to empower women and underrepresented minorities. Doing so means improving the overall workforce, because, as Dr. Upton notes, “There is a huge amount of research that shows healthcare organizations don’t deliver good quality of care if the populations that they serve aren’t at the table looking at programs, looking at access.” Without people who represent the patient population, the organization can’t know anything about how that population actually lives, and consequently can’t provide care the way they need it. “All the best intentions in the world end up in planning that doesn’t meet the needs of that population,” she says.

Affecting change

African Americans, Latin Americans, and Native Americans make up less than 15 percent of the laboratory professional workforce. African Americans and Latin Americans make up less than 7 percent of the pathology workforce, and no data was available for Native Americans. While women outnumber men in the laboratory workforce, they hold fewer than 20 percent of healthcare leadership roles.

These numbers show a wide disparity within pathology and laboratory medicine, and ASCP’s Diversity & Inclusion initiative hopes to reduce this disparity by building awareness, creating mentorship opportunities, and developing content and solutions that people can use within their own organization to help develop a more diverse and inclusive workforce. “If we’re going to serve our patient populations well, both in terms of ASCP and our individual workplaces, it’s impossible to do that unless we have the voices of those populations at the table and in our laboratories. We have to have that,” Dr. Upton says.

With this new initiative, ASCP will build, strengthen, and support training programs needed to allow people from underrepresented populations to join the pathology and laboratory workforce, and ultimately become leaders within the profession. It is one of many actions the initiative is working on, but a critical one for the endurance of the profession.

“You can’t do a good job unless you are listening to the people you are serving,” says Dr. Upton. “And you can’t listen to the people you’re serving unless those people are included among the active participants in the planning and execution of care.” Learn more about ASCP's diversity and inclusion initiative at www.ascp.org/diversity.