Leveraging the Social Determinants of Health to Enhance Nursing Workforce Diversity

It has been reported that patients prefer provider similarity with regards to race, ethnicity and gender, and greater patient satisfaction is reported with patient-provider concordance. However, minorities make up only 7% (4% Black, 3% all other minorities) of the nurse workforce in Greater Cincinnati. In the state of Ohio only 10.8% of nurses are non-white minorities. The aims and goals of this proposal are twofold: to increase the ethnic/racial diversity of the nursing workforce at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center by creating an employment pipeline from UC Blue Ash and Cincinnati State Technical and Community College ADN programs, which have greater ethnic/racially diverse student populations; and to ensure progressive continued education of the under-represented ethnic/racially diverse graduates from the ADN programs who are employed as a result of this employment pipeline to complete their BSN degree at the University of Cincinnati College of Nursing.