Abstract

The proportion of people who are ethnically diverse is growing in the United States, Australia, Canada and western Europe. Racial and ethnic disparities in health status remain despite thirty years of multicultural health initiatives in Australia and forty years of Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and Affirmative Action legislation in the United States. Diversity management is a human resource management approach emerging from the United States that advocates valuing diversity, in both “hard” and “soft” versions. A “Scandinavian model” of diversity management is emerging from critiques of the US model. Little empirical research has been conducted on how diversity management is enacted in healthcare organizations. This paper reports on a comparative survey of managers from 30 Pennsylvania hospitals with 9 in Sydney, Australia. Findings show that hospitals can improve in implementation of best practices in diversity management for both the Australian and the US samples. Questions of how management concepts translate across countries, health care organizations and professions are raised.