--by Kelly Laflamme, EH Program Director
The U.S. Census recently released population projections for our nation and predicted that the U.S. will become a “nation of plurality.” By the end of this decade, no single racial or ethnic group will constitute a majority of children under 18. This matches what we learned earlier this year when, for the first time in U.S. history, the Census reported there were more births to minorities than to whites in the U.S.
As goes the nation, so goes New .Hampshire. According a report from UNH’s Carsey Institute, in the last decade racial and ethnic minorities produced 50% of the state’s population gain. While racial and ethnic minorities comprised nearly 8% of the state’s population in 2010, among children, minorities were over 12% of the population. This is why the Endowment for Health and our partners in the New Hampshire Health and Equity Partnership (NH HEP) are engaged in research, dialogue, training and planning with health-related and health care organizations to ensure our systems are culturally appropriate and that no one experiences unfair challenges to health based on their language, race or ethnicity.
We’ve long been invested in building the state’s ability to bridge language differences. But ensuring everyone has an equal opportunity to be healthy will take more than an interpreter. We are leading conversations about the importance of creating a health care workforce that reflects the diversity of our residents. Through funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we’ve created the NH Nursing Diversity Pipeline. The Office of Minority Health and Refugee Affairs partnered with us to train ethnic community health workers and design health education modules for immigrants and refugees, who are unfamiliar with our health care system. And a diverse collaborative is now benefiting from nearly $100,000 in technical assistance from Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Foundation’s Culture InSight program to help institutions of higher learning, health care providers and decision makers to be better prepared to recruit, train and employ a more diverse health care workforce in our future.
There is much more work ahead of us, but the good news is that we started this work long before the Census released its report and NH is increasingly ready to embrace the change ahead.
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