SSM Health is honored to be a recipient of the St. Louis Business Journal’s 2024 Champions for Diversity & Inclusion Awards. We are proud of our commitment to ensuring diversity and inclusion are part of our internal fabric, and we appreciate our unique workforce.
Our vision is to be the high-quality, value-based health care leader in every community we serve, while advancing health equity, accessibility, and affordability for all people.
The Business Journal will publish a special section on Sept. 13 that will highlight the work of SSM Health and other companies “to make the region a more inclusive place to live, work and play.”
SSM Health’s rich legacy is grounded in a commitment to ensuring all people – especially those most in need – receive high-quality, compassionate care. Beyond clinical care, we also use our expertise and resources to advance community health, and advocate for health equity and social justice; working to address the underlying causes of health disparities through a comprehensive, integrated approach. We collaborate with health care providers and other community partners to meet local gaps in the health care landscape, especially those in diverse and multicultural communities.
We implemented universal screening for social determinants of health for all of our adult impatient facilities in 2023 and launched an electronic referral management platform, embedded in our electronic health record, to enable connections between providers and community-based support organizations to meet patient needs such as food insecurity, access to safe housing, and transportation.
SSM Health’s commitment to promoting leadership and workforce diversity is focused on the goal of reflecting the diversity of the communities we serve. We have adopted organizational goals around increasing workforce diversity and health equity, and we monitor and manage these as part of our core performance, just like other key quality or financial metrics.
Over the past two years, SSM Health cultivated 23 new inclusive talent partnerships focused on sourcing top talent from a variety of diversity dimensions to include persons of color, veterans, persons with disabilities, and other vulnerable populations. These formal partnerships cover various workforce segments including emerging workers from the educational system, current SSM Health team members, and transitional workers from a variety of community settings.
As a result of these efforts, SSM Health has added more than 1,000 new team members of color among leaders and professionals – a 40% increase since January 2021.
