Executive Diversity Career Navigator (EDCN) is a centralized resource designed for you—the diverse healthcare leader. EDCN offers its users easy—and vast majority free-access to information, tools, and inspiration for navigating their career paths to senior level positions. EDCN is a place for healthcare leaders from diverse backgrounds and at all career levels to learn from others who have successfully navigated their route to C-suite healthcare management.
Research and real-world experience confirm diversity at the highest ranks of healthcare management contributes to improved quality, equity, and safe care for all persons. However, the path to senior levels can be fraught with challenges—particularly for healthcare professionals from underrepresented groups.
EDCN is a collaborative project of six national healthcare organizations dedicated to advancing executive diversity:
Many of the EDCN contributors are racially/ethnically or LGBT diverse healthcare executives who candidly share their own experiences and offer suggestions targeted to a comparably diverse audience. Any healthcare professional, however, will find EDCN’s materials useful.
In February 2016, the senior leaders of the above groups formally signed a “Healthcare Executive Diversity Memorandum of Agreement (MOA),” in which they committed their respective organizations to “engage in collaborative initiatives designed to increase and sustain diversity and inclusion at the highest levels of healthcare leadership.”
In June 2016, the MOA participating organizations convened their senior leaders to explore a common critical issue and propose a practical way to address the issue:
Diverse healthcare professionals encounter issues and opportunities—some akin to the majority, some more pronounced for diverse persons, and others unique to diverse persons—on their career journey. They need to know what those opportunities and issues may be and ways to maximize the opportunities while diminishing or eliminating the debilitating impact of those issues.
Create an online centralized resource for healthcare executives from underrepresented groups to successfully navigate their career paths to senior level positions. Ensure the resource is easily accessible, tailored to the interests and needs of the targeted groups, and well-publicized.