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DPH reports progress on racial equity action plans; HR outlines recruitment, training and data work
Summary
The Department of Public Health and DPH Human Resources reported midyear progress on a racial equity action plan: OHE will expand staff and publish a dashboard; DPH requires equity learning for staff, reports thousands of completed training modules, and HR detailed steps to reduce hiring wait times and address pay equity.
Department leaders updated the commission on midyear progress implementing the departmental racial equity action plan and related HR deliverables.
Dr. Ayanna Bennett, director of the Office of Health Equity, said the office is expanding staff and capacity (targeting about 10 OHE staff plus divisional equity leads) and developing an equity impact assessment tool and a public-facing equity dashboard (about 10 measures). She reported that DPH has already completed many activities in the racial equity action plan and that the commission is at about 60% of its plan items.
Bennett described a required equity-learning expectation that DPH employees complete at least four hours of equity learning per year and highlighted two online orientation modules (intro to health equity; sexual orientation and gender identity) and a five-month equity fellowship. Bennett said the training aims to build structural competence and manager-level accountability through competencies and data tracking.
Director Louanna Kim (DPH HR) said HR comprises roughly 140 staff serving more than 8,000 DPH employees and described HR deliverables: an HR Equity Council, a draft recruitment and hiring policy, a DEI dashboard of workforce metrics, action on pay-distribution and premium-pay transparency, and a focus on five clinical classifications where recruitment and hiring pipelines require attention. Kim emphasized work to shorten hiring wait times and to expand data analytics while protecting confidential demographic information.
Kim and Bennett provided aggregate training-completion numbers for online modules (for example, more than 4,700 completions for the intro-to-health-equity module and thousands for other modules) and said equity learning is being integrated into personnel performance conversations.
Commissioners asked about extending training to contractors and other city departments, the timeline for public dashboard publication, and follow-up on how new hires receive orientation and ongoing competency reinforcement. Bennett and Kim said the materials are being shared and that they will explore wider distribution and more robust onboarding and follow-up arrangements.
Both offices said additional reporting and dashboards are planned for the coming year and that they will return with more data and drafts of operational policies as they are completed.
