Novant Health Hires Transcultural Health Managers To Help Ensure Equitable Outcomes

A local health care organization is focusing on helping patients from a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds, including those in the LGBTQ community. Novant Health is training and recruiting professionals to help ensure equitable outcomes for all.

They're called transcultural health managers, and Novant currently employs four of them — two in Winston-Salem and two in Charlotte. They train health care teams using customized education related to gender, age, race and more. One goal is to make sure team members understand their patient's preferred pronouns.

Wendy Renedo is a transcultural health manager based in Charlotte.

"Every person that the patient encountered was having to ask what organs were present in order for us to know how to care for the patient," says Renedo. "And by creating an organ inventory within our gender identity smart form, it allowed for that to cross through the medical records so that question didn't have to be asked over and over to the patient."

Renedo says the work is critical to health care providers — learning to consider the perspectives of patients coming from a culture that may be far different from their own — and for patient populations who've faced discrimination in the past causing them to delay treatment that can become more difficult and costly.