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Largest U.S. Hospital Group Will Require ‘Conscious Inclusion’ Training, Recommended Employees Read ‘White Fragility’

The "conscious inclusion" training will include activities like the "Name That Bias" card game.

   DailyWire.com
UKRAINE - 2021/04/23: In this photo illustration, the HCA Healthcare logo seen displayed on a smartphone and a pc screen.
Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The nation’s largest hospital group will require “conscious inclusion” training for all employees this year and recommended that employees read Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” according to internal company documents.

HCA Healthcare said that all employees will receive mandatory “conscious inclusion” training in 2021 as part of their “annual code of conduct refresher training,” according to the internal documents, which were provided to The Daily Wire by an HCA employee.

“Conscious inclusion” training is considered the next step after “unconscious bias” training. While the goal of “unconscious bias” training is to reveal to someone their own internal barriers to inclusivity, the goal of “conscious inclusion” training is to provide them with the tools to do something about it.

So far, 45% of HCA employees at the director level or above have already completed “conscious inclusion” training, the mammoth hospital group said.

The “conscious inclusion” training will include activities like the “Name That Bias” card game, and will last up to two and a half hours, an outline of the training shows.

Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist” were recommended to employees in a supplemental section with additional resources on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Also recommended was “When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir,” which was co-authored by Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, who on Thursday announced her resignation amid backlash over her expensive lifestyle, which includes four homes.

The hospital group also outlined other “equity” commitments for this year, including a goal to have 35% of new hires for management and supervisor roles be people of color.

HCA also announced a new sponsorship program “for a select cohort of Black colleagues to accelerate advancement in leadership.” The program was recommended by HCA’s Black Senior Leadership Council, which was established last year and spearheaded diverse talent recruitment initiatives.

The hospital group is also pledging to invest $300,000 in grants for community partners “supporting social justice and health equity.”

Last summer, HCA’s Chief Diversity Officer Sherri Neal announced a new program where HCA pledged to match employees’ donations to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Black Lives Matter Foundation, the National Urban League, and “other nonprofits that support racial justice and address health equity for communities of color.”

It is unclear whether the donations went to the actual Black Lives Matter movement or the “Black Lives Matter Foundation,” an unaffiliated charitable organization with one paid employee and a completely different goal of “bringing the community and police closer together,” according to its founder. A slew of companies and organizations mistook the group for the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation last summer.

HCA did not respond to a request for comment.

The Nashville-based health care group operates at least 185 hospitals and about 2,000 health care sites in the U.S. and Britain, including surgery centers, urgent care centers, diagnostic and imaging centers, and walk-in clinics. It is the largest health system in the U.S. both by net patient revenue and by member hospitals.

The group’s equity goals make HCA the latest health care group to ramp up its equity initiatives in 2021.

Earlier this month, the American Medical Association (AMA) released a lengthy “anti-racist” plan detailing the organization’s ambitious plan to “embed racial justice” in the medical profession.

The AMA’s plan pushes for expanding medical school education to include “critical race theory,” “anti-racism,” and “equity-explicit” training.

The American Heart Association (AHA) adopted a similar anti-racist ideology, prompting a lawsuit last year over disciplinary action taken against an Asian American doctor who questioned whether using race in admissions decisions is legal.

Meanwhile, medical schools have adopted dramatic affirmative action policies in order to matriculate a “critical mass” of black applicants, who tend to score lower on the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) than their white and Asian counterparts.

Such policies have raised concerns among members of the medical community that lowering standards for those providing life-saving care could have dangerous consequences.

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