Who can use the Healthy Diversity Assessment Tool?

The tool is addressing health organizations and institutions in both the public, private and voluntary sectors. The tool is developed for assessment of many different efforts and practices that may range from specially designed pilot projects to common and ordinary practices aiming to support and improve diversity management and intercultural communication within various healthcare services. To exemplify:

• Assessment of Evaluation of new staff policy and organizational procedures to increase the recruitment of health professionals with a ethnic minority background.
• Assessment of longstanding interpretation systems in order to clarify if they adequately meet the needs of patients and relatives.
• Assessment of barriers for ethnic minorities´ access to and use of outpatient services etc.

Regardless whether the assessment deals with an ordinary service or a new pilot project, one rule of thumb is that all assessment should be based on the aims, objectives and intended results and effect as set for the effort. These items are not always clear. However, the methodology in the assessment tool l can help to establish them.

The tool can in principle be used for both internal and external assessments. Most often, decisions about assessments are made at a management level, be it in small or large organisations. However, another rule of thumb for the good assessment practice is to involve all actors and stakeholders affected by the service in the data collection. Thus, in many cases, the management level as well as health practitioners, patients and relatives etc. will all be contributors and informants in the assessment.