Health care organizations are confronting the sharpest workforce pressure in decades — demographic shifts, talent shortages, rising patient expectations, and mounting burnout.
Traditional workforce planning, built for a far more stable labor market, can’t keep pace with these realities. To build a resilient talent pipeline and stabilize staffing, HR leaders must embrace a fundamentally different approach.
That approach is embedded inclusion: treating inclusion as a core workforce planning mechanism that directly strengthens recruiting, retention, mobility, and patient care.
Why Workforce Planning Must Evolve — Now
The demographic transformation reshaping the U.S. is also reshaping both sides of the health care equation: patients and workers.
Patient populations are becoming more diverse, and representation in care teams is increasingly linked to better outcomes, higher trust, and improved adherence.
At the same time, the health care labor market is tightening dramatically — with shortages projected across nursing, behavioral health, primary care, and front-line support roles.
These pressures collide in a single truth: Health care organizations cannot meet future patient demand without a more inclusive talent strategy. Inclusive pipelines broaden supply. Inclusive mobility unlocks hidden talent. Inclusive supervision reduces turnover. And inclusive team environments improve both engagement and patient safety.
Embedded inclusion is not a “nice-to-have.” It is an operational necessity.
What Embedded Inclusion Really Means
Most health care organizations already have well-intentioned programs that touch inclusion and diversity (I&D). But embedded inclusion goes further:
It weaves inclusion into every workforce planning decision — role design, hiring pipelines, scheduling practices, supervisory models, and career mobility frameworks.
It shifts inclusion from a program owned by HR to a capability owned by every leader.
It aligns inclusion to measurable workforce outcomes: reduced turnover, stronger succession pipelines, and more stable patient care teams.
The payoff is real. Organizations with more inclusive workforce systems consistently see stronger decision-making, improved team performance, and higher retention — all critical in a sector where staffing stability drives both financial performance and patient outcomes.
Leadership Must Model the Shift
Embedded inclusion starts with leadership behavior.
“Your actions show what you care about. Ask your team what they think you care about and see if it matches,” said Adrina A. Walker, vice president of human resources at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
This kind of self-awareness is not a soft skill, it’s a workforce planning requirement. Leaders who understand their own patterns are better equipped to:
Mitigate bias in hiring and job assignments.
Distribute opportunities equitably.
Build psychologically safe teams that encourage employees to stay longer and perform better.
Listening deeply to employees is also critical. Engagement surveys reveal hot spots, Walker said, but leaders must go beyond the data. “The data tells you where to look. But you have to talk with employees directly to uncover inequities that must be addressed,” Walker said.
These conversations reveal the root causes behind turnover — such as inconsistent supervision, lack of mobility pathways, or inequities in scheduling flexibility.
Embedding Inclusion into Workforce Planning
To operationalize embedded inclusion, HR leaders must adopt a more rigorous, systemic approach. Walker outlined several foundational steps:
Define what inclusion means for your organization.
Clarity is essential. Leaders should align on:
- What inclusion looks like on the ground.
- What it feels like to employees.
- How success should be measured.
Without shared definitions, organizations struggle to apply inclusion consistently across hiring, promotions, and role assignments.
Build inclusive pipelines and mobility pathways.
Workforce shortages cannot be solved through recruitment alone. Embedded inclusion requires:
- Partnerships to expand access to underrepresented candidates.
- Equitable advancement processes.
- Mobility frameworks that remove structural barriers to growth.
This approach unlocks talent that may already exist within the organization but remains overlooked.
Own the organizational reality.
Walker emphasized the importance of truth-telling, saying, “We [HR] are really good at telling the business what they want to hear, but we’ve got to go back to being the truth tellers for the world we work in.”
Owning the data, even when it challenges the status quo, allows HR to identify structural barriers that restrict talent flow and delay progress toward workforce goals.
Commit to long-term change.
“Whatever plan you come up with, add a year,” Walker said.
Pipeline development, inclusive mobility systems, and leadership capability building all require sustained investment — but produce durable, long-term returns.
A Strategic Imperative for Health Care’s Future
Health care’s workforce crisis will not be solved through traditional levers alone. To build stronger pipelines, stabilize care teams, and meet the expectations of a changing patient population, HR leaders must adopt inclusion as a core workforce planning tool — not a separate initiative.
Embedded inclusion gives health care organizations the ability to recruit more effectively, retain more consistently, and plan more intelligently for the future.
The organizations that succeed in the next decade will be those that recognize inclusion not as a value statement, but as a structural capability — one that directly strengthens patient outcomes, workforce resilience, and organizational performance.
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