Observation: I chose Cultivating a Culture: Implementing Methods to Embrace Diversity and Inclusion, by Barbara S. Jacobs et al., because I have been a judgemental person in my past and want to educate myself a bit about diversity. I am also going to be a nurse or doctor some day and wanted to see what the healthcare field was doing in regards to embracing everyone for who they are instead of ostracizing whole cultures. The article mentions implicit bias and how they were implementing plans to reduce it.
Relevance: My topic is youth homelessness and what caused it. At the moment. I believe that genetics makes us who we are and tells us what our behavior will be like. If my father did; there is a good chance I will too. So this moves beyond why we become homeless to how we become black, or gay, or someone who gives up, or someone who is smart, and why we are judged for it and how do we fix it, or does it need to be fixed? I believe some of it does, like the homelessness and giving up in my genes; that needs to go. But does the black need to be cleansed from our genes? Hell no, and neither does lesbian, or gay, or transgender. Or does it? Was there a point in time when a baby is woven together that somehow the girl DNA was woven into the mind of a boys body? Is it a defect or is it normal? These are just ideas formulating in my mind but what is it? All I do know is that the people that this happened to don’t deserve to be judged. Corrected, yes, some. But judged and ridiculed and ostrasized? No.
Argument: I would say that the main objective of the article was to make it known, for one, that discrimination against every culture that is different from what we have portrayed as normal for generations is still a problem, and two, what are we doing/going to do about it. The argument in this article resides in a hospital in Annapolis, Maryland named Anne Arundel Medical Center (AAMC), and goes out to all other healthcare professionals who care to listen. They have “cultivated a culture” of professionals and leaders who are inclusive to diversity. Their plan of action includes; performance metrics which is a system that reads the performance of workers and judges them on things like equity and equality, business resource groups who have meetings, discussions, and even role-playing on subjects within implicit bias and the like, they have implemented programming to educate workers on all the different cultures and languages, and finally, they are moving toward acceptance of every culture, including LGBTQ individuals as well as African Americans and Hispanics and the like, onto the workforce within hospitals and other healthcare centers. This is an argument of compassion and love and of what healthcare providers and others want the near future to look like within hospitals and eventually everywhere else.