In the first of a three-part series on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues, Alexis welcomes guests John Diederich, CEO, Rush Copley Medical Center, Mary Shillkaitis, COO, Rush Copley Medical Center, and current UI MHA student Kori Thomas.

Alexis Clark

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to From the Front Row, brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. My name is Alexis Clark, and if this is your first time with us, welcome. We’re a student run podcast that talks about major issues in public health, and [inaudible 00:00:19] relevant to anyone, both in and out of the field of public health.

Alexis Clark:

Today, we are excited to welcome MHA alum, John Diederich, President and CEO of Rush Copley Medical Center, Mary Shillkaitis Senior Vice President of Operations and Chief Operating Officer of Rush Copley Medical Center, and last, but not least, Kori Thomas, current MHA student here at the University of Iowa, who has spent the summer interning under these two great leaders. Thank you all for coming on the show.

John Diederich:

Thanks so much.

Kori Thomas:

Happy to be here.

Mary Shillkaitis:

Happy to be here, thanks, Alexis.

Alexis Clark:

Today we’ll be talking about a topic that is still at the forefront of conversations and something that the show has talked about previously, and I can promise you, we will continue to talk about it in the future, just because it is that important, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Alexis Clark:

Before we dive into our discussion, let’s hear a brief background from each of you and a background on Rush Copley to give our listeners some context. John, why don’t you start? What’s been your journey to get to your current position?

John Diederich:

Well, thanks Alexis. And thanks for inviting us, Kori, as well. I’m looking forward to having this conversation. My journey could be a whole podcast by itself, I think, but I’ll try to keep it short and sweet. Since I am an alum of your program, I’m proud to be able to give back to the Iowa MHA program today and have a conversation.

John Diederich:

I’m currently the President and CEO of Rush Copley Medical Center. I joined the team back in 1985 when I was 16 years old as a pot washer at the old Copley Hospital, and I ended up getting to know a lot of people in the hospital and I worked in the cafeteria for a while, and I decided that I would choose healthcare management as a career. And I went to the University of Iowa as a undergrad, got my bachelor’s degree, and I stayed on and was a dual degree student at the MHA program with an MBA.

John Diederich:

I stayed for three years in the master’s program and got the two degrees, and when I came out, I, as you guys are doing now, I interviewed for fellowships all across the country, in Philadelphia, in New Orleans, in Oklahoma, all over the place, and I kept on coming in second for all these nationally competitive fellowships. And I hope you guys land one early, because it was a stressful time. But nonetheless, I was kind of humbled and a little embarrassed by the fact that I didn’t have a job right out of school.

John Diederich:

I came back to my hometown hospital, and at the time Copley had just received a certificate of need to build a brand new hospital, a replacement hospital, it was about six miles east of where our old location was, and our HR director at the time invited me to help them out with the project planning and planning for a new hospital, which was, in hindsight, the best thing that ever happened to me in my career, because I got to watch a hospital grow out of a farm field and I was involved in a lot of different departments.

John Diederich:

Once we moved here, I got married, met my wife, had three kids, so that was a great experience, of course. And then just stayed on as a lifer at Copley. I worked in revenue cycle for maybe nine years, joined the executive team in 2002. I became Chief Operating Officer in 2006, and then CEO in 2019, just in time for the pandemic, so when that was quite a journey. It’s a long story. That’s 36 years in about three minutes there.

Alexis Clark:

That’s great. Before we move on to the other guests, John, you mentioned that you saw a new hospital come from farmland, essentially. What’s Aurora like now?

John Diederich:

Aurora has been a growing community for many, many years. It’s actually now the second largest city in the state of Illinois, after Chicago. So we have about 200,000 or so people in Aurora, but we’re situated right next to Naperville, which is also a very large city, I think one of the top three or four in the state as well, and if you put our entire landscape together, we serve, in our primary service area, about 400-500,000 people in the far west suburbs of Chicago, Fox Valley region.

John Diederich:

Aurora has been a growing town and Naperville has been a growing town for a long, long time. Our growth is actually coming from the west now in Kendall County, in the Yorkville, Oswego, Montgomery communities, and that’s where we see our future growth from a primary service area perspective.

Alexis Clark:

Thanks for that background. Mary, what about you, what’s been your journey to get to your current position?

Mary Shillkaitis:

Well, I think I’ll start at the end of the journey, maybe. I’ve been at Rush Copley for about 20 years, and I think I’m sitting in this chair that’s my pinnacle opportunity. So I recently became our Chief Operating Officer after a long career, both in healthcare and here at Rush Copley.

Mary Shillkaitis:

My background is nursing. I’m very proud because I’m the first woman in this chair as well, and I think I’ll share that because we’re on a DE&I conversation today. And I also share that proudly as I’m growing through healthcare, public health, as a nurse, I’ve seen many things, I’ve had many roles. I’ve been a nurse recruiter. I’ve done transport nursing. I’ve spent a lot of time in the women’s health field.

Mary Shillkaitis:

There was a moment in my journey that I felt like I could make a difference being a healthcare leader and took a more traditional nursing leadership path. I was the Chief Nursing Officer here at Rush Copley for many years, helping us achieve our magnet status. And just prior to the pandemic, I was promoted to the Senior Vice President Chief Operating Officer, and I’m very, very happy in this role and have found that a background both clinically and in healthcare, you can really make a big difference from this viewpoint.

Mary Shillkaitis:

I’m really proud to be partnered with John. I think we work great together as a team as we grow services for our community.

Mary Shillkaitis:

Maybe to add just a little bit about what our organization looks like, I would say we’re a very sophisticated community hospital, 210 beds, a lot of the more sophisticated tertiary clinical programs, including open-heart services, a level three neonatal intensive care unit, major ambulatory programming. So I think we’re a pretty sophisticated community based healthcare center.

John Diederich:

And just for clarity too, we are part of the Rush University System for Health, which is made up of three hospitals, Rush University Medical Center, Downtown Chicago, Rush Oak Park in Oak Park, Rush Copley in Aurora. There’s also a university, Rush University, that’s part of the system, and there’s also a physician hospital organization called Rush Health out of Oak Brook. So we’re a pretty robust system with both community settings and academic settings.

Alexis Clark:

Great. Thank you both for the explanation, moving on to Kori. Kori, obviously you are an early [inaudible 00:07:03] so how did you find public health? And what about Rush Copley enticed you to apply to their internship?

Kori Thomas:

Well, I came into college essentially as an undecided major. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. I didn’t know that health would be my true calling. I’ve always enjoyed sports and nutrition, so I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I ended up starting with global health, just based off of going to Haiti and doing some internships there and that kind of segued into public health. When I told my stepmom at first, I was like, “I’m a major in public health,” and she was like, “Oh my gosh, Kori.” She was like, “I don’t think that’s where you want to be. I’m not sure if you know what public health really is, everything that goes into public health.” And I’m like, “Rosa, this is exactly where I need to be. I love it here.”

Kori Thomas:

I ended up having kind of a deeper conversation with my advisor and just explaining what my true interests were, which were physical activity and nutrition, how can we give people the proper education that they need to live a healthy lifestyle, a longer healthy lifestyle, and she led me to health promotion, which is all things that, which was great. So that was under the health and human physiology track, and so since it’s been history.

Kori Thomas:

I’m now in the MHA program, which is great. And through the MHA program, I had to do my internship and I started, well, I originally was just only going to apply to places in Iowa, just due to living situation. I didn’t consider Illinois at all just because I didn’t know anyone in Illinois and I was like, even though I have friends there, I don’t feel comfortable reaching out to their family. So I met with John because he was my alumni I was paired up with to do my resume review and he had fabulous feedback, as always, and I really enjoy talking with him, so I wanted to maintain that connection that we had.

Kori Thomas:

I reached out to him again and scheduled a meeting and he was like, “Hey, are you applying to Rush Copley’s internship? I was like, “I am now. Now that you bring it up, I sure am.” So I applied and I loved the people who interviewed me and just continue to come back for the interviews, they offered a next interview and then a next interview and then next thing I knew, I got the positions.

Kori Thomas:

That’s kind of what led me to Copley was just John’s little nudge of his question, “Hey, are you applying?” And I was like, “Yeah, why not?” And so it ended up working out great.

John Diederich:

Thank you, Kori. That’s good.

Kori Thomas:

Me too.

Alexis Clark:

Me three, or we wouldn’t be here. So, good job, Kori. So moving on to the bulk of our conversation, John and Mary, in whichever order you feel comfortable going in, can you discuss what DEI meant to Rush Copley 10 years ago and how has it progressed and what does DEI mean to the organization now?

John Diederich:

I think this might be more of a conversation between Mary and I. So I’ll just start off by saying 10 years ago, DEI to me was more about our community health needs. What do we need in our community? Every three years we do a community health needs risk assessment, and we saw that in many underserved populations in Aurora, we were having issues with our community members who were maybe more at risk or underserved having access to care, access to medication, access to insurance or insurance information. And we had a whole action plan related to that, which was more looking at a community approach to equity, I’d say health equity in our community, versus more of a internal assessment of what we were doing internally. It was more of a community assessment. I’ll pause there, let Mary comment on maybe where we were 10 years ago.

Mary Shillkaitis:

Yeah, thank you, John. And it’s interesting because John speaks to the framework that we use routinely in terms of a non-for-profit hospital, and that is to do a community health needs assessment on a routine basis. But I would say 10 years ago, I don’t know that in one way we were conscious of the terms, diversity, equity, inclusion. True, the terms existed, but not in a conscious conversation, so while we were doing a community health needs assessment, I don’t know that we were connecting all the dots of deeper meaning of diversity, equity, and inclusion as we do today.

Mary Shillkaitis:

Fast forward, 10 years forward, a more deliberate mindfulness, I believe, exists. I think the meaning of the terms has evolved over time. You see it much different in the literature today, in articles that we read and publications that we talk and share about. So I think there’s a deeper meaning today, and that’s a good thing and it’s brought more forward in consciousness, which is also a good thing, and we’re talking about it on a routine basis.

John Diederich:

I also think when we integrated with Rush University Medical Center a few years ago, four or five years ago, there was also a spotlight on that because Rush University Medical Center is pretty good in this space and it is a role model in the DE&I area. And I think we had a lot to learn from them.

John Diederich:

I think our focus area in the beginning was the LGBTQ area arena, and we had some startup programs here looking at health equity across that community but we really learned a lot from our colleagues down at Rush and brought some of those learnings to our hospital and applied for health equity leadership status through that and achieved that in 2018. So that’s where we started to really start to see some momentum building on the diversity, equity, and inclusion front.

Alexis Clark:

That’s excellent. I think it’s important to note what Mary said with diversity, equity, and inclusion meaning something completely different 10 years ago, and how it’s really evolved both in the literature and in day-to-day practice. Can you discuss what DEI means to you on a personal and professional level?

Kori Thomas:

To me, I think DEI truly means freedom in all aspects. Diversity, equity, and inclusion means that no matter where you came from, what gender you identify as, what sexuality you are, the color of your skin, your ethnicity, no matter what, we accept you and we value you. And no matter what, we want to provide you equal and equitable access to all opportunities or to anything that you need.

Kori Thomas:

I think personally DEI was something that I truly came to learn over the years, especially coming into college. I came to understand and realize that it’s a large aspect in my life, and I didn’t even realize it because growing up, I was raised in a white household so I was really sheltered from all the disparaging things that my peers were going through. So I didn’t know what to listen to or listen for, what I needed to look for. Because I had no idea.

Kori Thomas:

When I went to college, I branched out and learned the importance of diversity and inclusion. And when the George Floyd murder happened and later on the sentencing, I had to sit with my mom and have those tough conversations on what it truly meant to me and how this made me feel internally, and so I felt almost alone on my mom’s side of the family, just because they didn’t understand how close this hit home for me.

Kori Thomas:

Being a biracial child was always difficult for me because I never felt fully… I never really figured out what community I belong to because I wasn’t white and I wasn’t fully Black, and so it was strange always trying to figure that out in my day-to-day life, and growing up I had no idea. So when everything with George Floyd happened, I knew what role I played in the society and I knew I had to speak up, and it didn’t matter what community I identified with because using my voice to educate people on the years of suffering the Black and brown communities had to endure for centuries.

Kori Thomas:

For me, it started with addressing all the microaggressions that I experienced from what was being said about my hair, to the people making insensitive comments about my family being from Haiti and the name calling of the color of my skin. From there, I grew and blossomed into this incredibly passionate woman about diversity, equity, and inclusion, who truly wants to make the change for the better, and an organization accepting that I do have a different perspective to offer just due to how I grew up and where I’ve been throughout my life and my global experiences, is incredibly important. Although I may be 23 years old, I still have a very powerful voice to offer just, just like everyone else, and everyone has something unique to bring to the table.

Kori Thomas:

Professionally, I think we have a lot of work to do. And when I say we, I mean, corporate America in general. Sure Rush Copley has their areas of improvement, but so does everyone else, when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I’ve noticed in many organizations that DEI is almost side work or a subcategory to achieve, but it should never be that way. Diversity, equity, inclusion, it’s a whole department in some places. It’s a whole strategic goal. It’s continuous effort and work, and it can no longer be pushed to the side.

Kori Thomas:

I think we’ve all realized that minorities and people from non-majority backgrounds, they’re speaking up because they recognize the years of silence and they, along with myself, they want to see change happen. They want to be a part of the change that’s going to occur. And incremental steps become exceptional outcomes, and I think if one person in leadership makes that jump towards a better future, then I think that would make the world of difference.

Alexis Clark:

That answer was a lot to unpack, and I thank you for feeling like this is a platform that you can be open and honest about what you’ve endured. I had no idea. And I think it’s important to be willing to have those uncomfortable conversations or progress will not move forward.

Kori Thomas:

I think that’s what DEI is. That’s almost how people think of it, is an uncomfortable conversation. But what we want to shy away from is, it shouldn’t be an uncomfortable conversation. It never should be that way. It should be an opportunity for us to ask one another, how can we improve? And how can we make you feel more inclusive in this environment and make you feel comfortable coming to work every day and making an impact in the work that you’re doing, whether it’s providing care or being a receptionist, it doesn’t matter. How can we make you feel more comfortable here?

Alexis Clark:

That’s very true. That’s a good point. Mary, how do you plan to prioritize DEI over the next year and then moving forward to the next three to five years?

Mary Shillkaitis:

Well, I think I want to acknowledge Kori as well. I loved her comments and her passion, and we learned a lot working with Kori this summer. We had some wonderful projects that we did together, but even before that, John and I, and the rest of our executive team, we have been sorting through how we’ll incorporate DE&I to be part of our fabric, not just a side conversation, as Kori mentioned can happen all too often in organizations.

Mary Shillkaitis:

We’re very fortunate being part of a healthcare system, there’s a lot of work that has occurred at Rush University, the Academic Medical Center, and we, Rush Copley, is very engaged in that. So a couple of things we’ve done more recently, something that we’re very proud of here is our values, and here at Rush Copley, our values come forward in what we call our promise. And our promise isn’t just words on paper, but it’s very palpable within our organization. There’s simple statements like warm, friendly, greetings, answering your call lights, personal escort to your destination. And that promise is to our patients.

Mary Shillkaitis:

About two years ago, a year and a half ago, we added to our promise a statement around diversity, equity, and inclusion, that we want our value statement to incorporate that. Taking that further, we did a lot of training. So I think education is a big component of diversity, equity, and inclusion, kori mentioned that, and then even in your question, how did it look 10 years ago? We’re all ever learning and ever changing, and so educating our leader terms on understanding and having more of a broad base.

Mary Shillkaitis:

This year, fast forward, we’re going to educate all of our employees, which will involve about an hour education session on something we call implicit bias, so that will be an important component. We’ve connected it to our strategic plan. It is in our strategic plan to excel in this space and become better.

Mary Shillkaitis:

We opened a lending library to add to our repertoire more books so we can read and do better. And I happened to read a really wonderful book that I wanted to put this out there to the students of public health. It’s a book that actually inspired me called, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. I really recommend that read. It is a beautiful story. It opened my eyes to so many things. This book is specific to racism in America, but it really was a wonderful book that gave me insights to our journey in a whole new way.

Mary Shillkaitis:

Connecting the dots is what’s important for myself and John as leaders to make sure all of our employees and team members and the patients we care for have that understanding that folks having a space, feeling welcomed, as Kori talked about, and just being able to show up for who they are, is an important part of what we believe in.

Alexis Clark:

DEI has been a hot topic over the last couple of years, and I know there’s been a lot of pressure for organizations and businesses in all sectors to produce statements or policy changes, et cetera. John, how, as a leader, do you rise above these pressures and make sure that the culture of Rush Copley is inclusive?

John Diederich:

I’m going to mirror a little bit of what Mary said, maybe add a little bit to it. We don’t want DE&I to be a trend or a fad or, as Kori said, side work, it’s got to be ingrained and interwoven into our culture. That’s where it starts. So this is going to get into some maybe academic theory, where you have to start with the value statement, bring it down to the strategy level, and then take it to tactics. Those are the three steps.

John Diederich:

The first step, Mary mentioned our values, our promise, these are nine promises that we commit our employees to learn and to memorize and to act out in their daily work, and we start with orientation. Mary does a presentation in orientation, and throughout their time with Copley they wear it on their badge, it’s plastered all over our campus. And to add that equity and inclusion statement to our treat our patients with courtesy and respect, I think is a big statement for us.

John Diederich:

This isn’t something that’s just a hot topic to talk about in the summer of 2021, this is something that’s going to remain with our organization ongoing. So it starts with the values, then you have to connect the dots to your strategic plan. So, as Mary said, in our strategic plan, we were going to require all of our employees to go through implicit bias training this year. Our leadership did it last year. It was eyeopening. I think many of us thought that we might have some biases, but then your eyes were opened that we have more biases than we think, and that’s okay, that’s normal, and when we realized that, we were like, we got to take this to all employees and not just make it something that they have access to, but really make it a requirement that everyone is aware of the implicit bias that everyone has, no matter what your race is, no matter what your age or gender, we all have those biases, so that’s something we put into our strategic plan.

John Diederich:

Then taking that to the tactic level, looking at those department resources. Mary mentioned a couple of things. We also have a committee, a employee resource group, that meets regularly to talk about these topics. Mary and I have been hosting some town hall meetings related to the strategic plan, but where you can bring up anything. You can bring up inclusion questions or anything that’s controversial.

John Diederich:

I think that, for me, and I mentioned this in our management team this morning, to me, as leaders, we have to be approachable. People can’t be afraid to come talk to the CEO or the COO or the CFO. We have to be approachable. We have to be visible. And I love working in an organization where I know somebody who might feel that maybe I said something in a meeting that was maybe insensitive or somebody else could come up and say, “John, I know what you meant by this, but you might want to use these terms next time.”

John Diederich:

When we talk about having that uncomfortable conversation, yeah that might be uncomfortable, but really it’s more of an education. It’s just teaching each other and having a culture we’re we can do little nudges or correct each other when something’s said that maybe could be taken the wrong way. So I really enjoy working for an organization that has that. We still have a long way to go, as Mary said. We’re still learning every day, and we’ll be learning 10 years, 15, 20 years from now, we’re all going to be learning. I mean, we’re just trying to make this a better organization and really society a better place.

Alexis Clark:

You mentioned that Rush Copley created those nine promises. Can you mention who was a part of that committee that created those nine promises and what went into that?

John Diederich:

Sure, I’d be happy to. So when we moved the hospital back in 1995, we wanted to come up with… it was part of the re-engineering of healthcare, where we started looking at patient flow and how do we approach the patient care experience and everything else, and we decided at the time to make these nine statements and we put a committee together made up of staff level people, housekeepers, nurses, therapists, phlebotomists, accountants, and actually I was not on that committee, but my mother was at the time and she’s passed away since then, but she was the manager of housekeeping, so whenever someone says that about, how did that come to be, it actually is personal to me because she was on this team that helped build the promise statement to our patients.

John Diederich:

I’m very proud that here we are 25 years later and we don’t touch it very often. I think we’ve only touched it one other time. And I’m proud that we’re able to add the equity and inclusion into the promise this past year.

Mary Shillkaitis:

Alexis, just a little bit of add to that, that recommendation to add diversity, equity, and inclusion came from group we have called DIRA, the Diversity Inclusion Resource Alliance. So that’s an employee led team within our organization, a team that has a nice mighty force. We lost a little bit of traction of that team meeting in the pandemic. We all got distracted with caring for patients. But that team brought forward the recommendation to administration, to John and I, to add to our promise, and we could not say no. We were excited about it from the get.

Mary Shillkaitis:

Again, another example of what John mentioned, the ability for healthcare leaders, those of you who are going to go into healthcare for your future, your ability to connect with your teams and with the people that you serve and to listen for their ideas and be open to ideas and open to change is really critical to success. So we’re proud that it was our employees that brought forward the recent change.

Alexis Clark:

That’s excellent. And you guys have sprinkled some great pieces of advice throughout your answers, and definitely going to recommend it to all students interested in practicing healthcare, in whatever practice that may be.

Alexis Clark:

Kori, as you mentioned earlier, DEI has been at the forefront of what you do, both personally and professionally. Can you talk about your project work pertaining to DEI this summer at Rush Copley and highlight something that may have surprised you?

Kori Thomas:

This summer I did a huge project on diversity, equity, inclusion, and Mary, I would say, was my preceptor for the project. We worked very closely together on this project. It started out doing an impact report, and so that was just collecting, well, not just, that’s really important to see the growth that we’ve made over the years and where we could grow even more, it was collecting the initiatives that we have in place that pertain to the community, our staff, our patients, and putting a timeline together of just visualizing where have we grown over the past years, what have we done, and put together a presentation to present that.

Kori Thomas:

I didn’t get very far with that portion, just because I think we were still trying to figure out some things to put in, because there’s really a lot of initiatives that Rush Copley has done, whether they were large initiatives or just smaller initiatives, they’ve come a long way with DEI, and although I didn’t see all of them happen when I was there for the summer, it was really cool to just learn about what they’re investing their time into.

Kori Thomas:

Then the other side of the project was sending out a organization wide survey. It started out with focus groups, but we realized we had such a small portion of time framework to work within and we figured a survey would be a little better just to collect information quicker and put that all together for a presentation. So we sent out… I should know the stats of the survey by now, but [crosstalk 00:29:53].

Mary Shillkaitis:

You’re doing great, Kori, but we did a mixed method survey, both quantitative and qualitative, to our employees and the purpose of the survey was to get their attitudes on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Kori Thomas:

Each question, it spoke about something, whether it was diversity, equity, or inclusion. So one question would ask, do you feel comfortable expressing your opinion, whether it’s a differing opinion from others? And that spoke about inclusion. And do you feel that diversity is a priority for Rush Copley? That speaks about diversity. So each question had a category.

Kori Thomas:

In the beginning, we didn’t really set it up that way, it kind of just ended up working out that way, and we noticed like, oh my goodness, each question has a theme to it, and we felt at the end that was really important to highlight in our presentation.

Kori Thomas:

We had the survey open actually for two weeks and Mary and I spent our days just collecting the information and sifting through it. How can we categorize these responses into a presentation? How can we put them in buckets and then present it to where people can truly understand where people feel about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Kori Thomas:

I think I have four main takeaways from this survey. And I think the first one Mary is going to know very, very well what I mean by this, is there’s much more to a survey than you think, and when we were creating the survey, there were so many minute details that we didn’t even think of until the survey was out.

Kori Thomas:

For example, we didn’t translate this into Spanish. But one, there was such a small amount of time to get that translated within the next three days. And then also we want people to respond and be able to read the survey, how it’s presented already.

Kori Thomas:

We also didn’t define diversity, equity, and inclusion. We asked people their thoughts without giving them that understanding of what it was, because we also wanted to see, are people really aware of what DEI truly means? And another one is we sent out the survey and I think a couple of days later, we said, you know what, why don’t we distribute printed copies of the survey to staff members that don’t have regular access to computers or don’t have a smartphone to do a QR code, and so we did that to a couple of departments throughout the hospital, just to give them the same opportunity that secretaries may have or greeting staff may have to a computer.

Kori Thomas:

Then the second thing that I learned was the lack of education and understanding. Whether they were for a more inclusive environment or not, I think people just didn’t really understand what it truly means to have a diverse work staff and what it means to represent the community that you’re serving.

Kori Thomas:

Number three, how long people stay silent about topics that hit so incredibly home for them. This survey identified a lot of gaps within Copley, but it also brought to light some of the pain and hurt that people have felt for years and just didn’t feel comfortable bringing that topic up to their peers or to their managers or directors. We saw that in their survey responses. It wasn’t always positive responses, but that’s okay, because we wanted to understand their sentiments about the questions we were asking.

Kori Thomas:

I think the last thing that I truly took home from, or took with this project, was just some of the thoughts and comments people feel about certain topics. For example, pride, Black Lives Matter. People of color in general, these people are people we work with, we speak to every single day, and they feel so uncomfortable with who people are naturally, they can’t help but be negative. And you can’t be upset about that because that’s how they grew up. They don’t know any other way. And so our job is to help educate and to give them those points on, here’s where we’re coming from. I think that was the main things I learned from this project.

John Diederich:

We learned from you too, Kori, so we appreciate your feedback all summer.

Kori Thomas:

Yeah, no, I would say it was an incredible experience to do this project. I think over the summer I was given projects and they all were great, but this one was truly something that I felt I could contribute to and make a difference, a positive difference, in a community hospital. And I will forever take this experience with me because it is a topic that needs to be discussed more. And like I said earlier, organizations have whole departments on diversity, equity, inclusion, and I think it’s fabulous that Copley is putting diversity, equity, and inclusion in their strategic plan, they’re talking about it in their management agendas, they’re truly making obvious efforts to be better and do better. And I was so proud to be a part of that work that they were doing.

Mary Shillkaitis:

I’m going to compliment and just maybe brag a little bit here for Kori and our project. Truly, this was meant to be a baseline survey, and I love Kori came up with this, and I really want to compliment her. We were thinking of different things we could do, but she had an overarching intention, I would say, to hear the voice of our employees. We do a ton of surveys at Rush Copley, I think John and I are really in tune to trying to hear the voice of our employees, but Kori wanted to get insight on this particular topic, which we’ve not really done that before.

Mary Shillkaitis:

Some amazing things in the project. We had over a 20% response rate. That’s fantastic. So Kori, as a young researcher, she did a great job setting up the method of the survey. We learned a lot. We had limitations in our survey, but ultimately we got hundreds of responses and were able to categorize those responses to give us a little bit of an insight, a further insight, of the attitudes of our employees.

Mary Shillkaitis:

That’s powerful, because now we know how to enhance further from there. Education, strategies, learning sessions, listening sessions, Kori put together a whole list of things we could do into the future, based on what we learned and heard our staff speak. So I’m just really proud that Kori helped us with this project. And we’ll be doing the survey again to see how far we’ve come.

Kori Thomas:

I would love to see where you guys are with that whenever you distribute the survey, the responses. Have they changed? Have we grown in the topic of DEI?

Alexis Clark:

It sounds like this was a really rewarding project, Kori, and it’s been really great to listen to you. But before we wrap up, we’ve talked about all the progress Rush Copley has made over the last year and so on. What hardships have you encountered while making this progress?

John Diederich:

I have maybe one hardship and then maybe one final comment. But one of the hardships we have, frankly, is we need to have a more diverse board directors. When you look at it from a governance perspective, our board doesn’t have term limits, and we’ve got a lot of people who have been fiduciaries in our community for a long, long time, and they’ve done tremendous work, but we need to have our board be more reflective of the patients and the community that we serve.

John Diederich:

One of the things that is in my goals for this year is to create a Community Advisory Council which will be a place where we can cultivate new board members and develop a board succession plan so that we can bring in a more diverse group from an age perspective, from a gender perspective, from race, status, all those things, and a core competency for them is going to be knowing the voice of our community

John Diederich:

We always talk about, are board members good at finance? Are they good at marketing? Are they good at strategy? I think a core competency is, do you have the pulse of our community? And I think that’s just as important as having expertise in finance or any of those other things. So that’s one hardship I think that we need to overcome and I’m committed to doing that.

John Diederich:

And just a final thought I thought, I know one of your earlier comments was, what have we learned over the last 10 years, and 5, 10 years ago, if someone would have asked me, “John, are you aware and good at diversity, equity, and inclusion?” I probably would have naively said, “Sure.” I grew up in Aurora, it’s a diverse town. I grew up in a diverse neighborhood in a diverse town, so of course I grew up in that community, which I’m sure has helped me in some ways, but looking back on it, that would have been a naive thing to say, because when I was in school at Iowa they taught us about finance and marketing and governance and epidemiology and medical terminology and medical ethics, and all those important classes that you guys are taking, but there was no formal education in diversity, equity, inclusion, or in implicit bias.

John Diederich:

I hope that universities and you guys might be seeing it now. I hope universities are building that into their curriculum so that our young leaders come out more prepared maybe than I did coming out of school and can hit the ground running with some of these initiatives.

Kori Thomas:

I think something, a final comment as well is, I came into, especially my project, almost forcing people to listen and hear me out, because I thought I was helping change the culture for the better, and I’d say that I was incredibly wrong for that. Diversity, equity and, inclusion in general is a very sensitive topic. Like I said, it can be uncomfortable, but people always have different opinions and different views about the topics that lie underneath DEI, and so I learned that projecting my views and opinions on others for the better, was not always the way to go about that conversation.

Kori Thomas:

I found that I needed to provide a safe environment for people to discuss the topic with me. I needed to listen to them and hear their voice and value it. And sure, not everyone has positive things to say, but our job as leaders is to not judge one another for the opinions that they have, but to value and figure out what perspective that they can bring to the table.

Mary Shillkaitis:

Alexis, maybe I’ll summarize too with a final comment. I’ve loved what everybody has said, and I think while, in one way, a hardship was the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion have become so emotional in our country and have started the conversations, as Kori had spoke to, with the death of George Floyd, et cetera, the murder of George Floyd.

Mary Shillkaitis:

Fast forward, we’re a healthcare organization leading people, taking care of our community, and what hardship was, helping those words remain focused on the patient for the purposes of what we’re doing here in healthcare. Kori and I spend a lot of time on that. And even as we evaluated the responses of our survey, we realized the words charge response, and that was good to see and hear all that, and what we want to do as healthcare leaders here at Rush Copley is just continue to keep focused on the patient and how our growth in diversity, equity, and inclusion ultimately affects and improves the patient outcome.

Mary Shillkaitis:

We’re really proud that Kori connected those dots in her work. They may seem a bit obvious, but when you have a country that’s kind of on fire with these topics, it wasn’t as obvious as maybe it should have been, and so that’s what we’re learning and that’s what our intention is, is to really try to stay focused on patient care and how focus on these topics can improve healthcare for folks, truly improve their healthcare and their lives, subsequently. [crosstalk 00:43:23]. I loved working with Kori. She’s our warrior.

Alexis Clark:

On that note, I just wanted to thank all three of you for taking the time out of your busy schedules to talk about DEI and what Rush Copley is doing currently in their different initiatives. So thank you all so much.

John Diederich:

Thanks, Alexis. This is an important topic, and it’s nice to give back to the university. I appreciate if you guys ever need more speakers, I’m happy to help out. Go Hawks.

Alexis Clark:

Go Hawks.

Kori Thomas:

Go Hawks.

Mary Shillkaitis:

Great work, Alexis. Thanks everyone.

Alexis Clark:

That’s it for our episode this week. Big thanks to John, Mary, and Kori for coming on with us today. This episode was hosted, written, edited, and produced by Alexis Clark. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

Alexis Clark:

If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues. Our team can be reached at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Stay happy, stay healthy, and keep learning.