DE&I isn’t ever ‘over.’ It’s a consistent, constant effort to recognize, learn, dialog, partner and devise ways to address issues that impact employees, colleagues, patients and customers on behalf of your business, office, organization.

The immense challenge of DE&I is that those who are committed to it find that they consistently need to push it to the front of the priorities facing company leaders, managers and teams.

Keeping DE&I top of mind and a top priority is critical.

In fact, making sure that the burgeoning DE&I initiatives and programs embraced in the past 3 or 4 years continue to make inroads is a challenge, sorry to say.

Recently I learned of a larger ‘Diversity Fatigue’ Summit (https://inclusionforum.global/~diversity~fatigue~summit/) hosted this past May by the Global Inclusion Online Forum, where there was participation from many prominent companies who were meeting to tactically figure out how to keep their progress moving, how to make sure their momentum and new programs continued. They asked how could better training and coaching tackle diversity and inclusion issues earlier? In the hiring process? In promotions and compensation planning? In a stream of checks and balances that are measured and tracked?

The goal was clearly to ensure the best approaches so that fairness and inclusion can become part of the visbly-understood leadership and managerial goals within a company.

In eyecare, as I suspect is the case with other healthcare and retail businesses, equity & inclusion is not just an internal issue, impacting staff and workers ‘inside’ the profession or practice.

But DE&I is also a major patient population and access issue—something that if considered from the customer or patient’s point of view can very well identify the needs and means of making sure patients’ healthcare concerns are being served and understood by them, their families or caretakers.

Perhaps that will end up becoming the “angle” to drive business owners and organizations and individuals to stay on the productive DE&I path and to continue to push for a higher profile of healthcare professionals who are brought into the field to help create new solutions.

From our staff to you and yours, best wishes for the holidays and a happy, healthy New Year.

maxelrad@jobson.com