Children's Mercy Kansas City awarded 2024 Leader in Disability Inclusion Seal of Accomplishment
The Center for Disability Inclusion (CDI) awarded Children’s Mercy Kansas City a 2024 Leader in Disability Inclusion Seal of Accomplishment at the CDI Annual Awards Event Luncheon on Dec. 5, 2024.
One of only 16 organizations to achieve the designation, Children’s Mercy collaborated with CDI to continue advancing its disability inclusion efforts. Language and Accessibility Services, Project RISE, the Office of Equity and Diversity, Human Resources and Patient and Family Services partnered to identify and tackle specific inclusion milestones throughout the year.
“This award is such a strong reflection of who we are as an institution and what values are important to us as we serve the community,” said Tom Wright, Executive Vice President, Chief Human Resources Officer.
The multidisciplinary team started with CDI’s benchmarking survey to measure accessibility and accommodations, career development and retention, compensation benefits, diversity and inclusion, matrix and analytics, and more.
“They identified areas we really thrived in as an organization and then areas that we could improve,” said Amy Mesplay, Project RISE Manager. “From feedback, we picked out core areas to focus on through 2024.”
The team completed four important milestones this past year:
- Continued disability inclusion upgrades to restrooms by installing eight more automatic door openers and one new adult changing table.
- Collaborated with Disability Support Services departments at 13 area colleges to raise awareness of opportunities at Children’s Mercy.
- Created an internal Accessibility Benchmark Survey to help collect data and inform our ongoing commitment to being an accessible organization for all team members, patients and families.
- Offered a variety of system-wide disability inclusion team member education opportunities to improve understanding and awareness.
In addition to identifying and accomplishing these milestone goals, the team also attended monthly networking meetings and educational opportunities, completed the Society for Human Resource Management Foundation’s Employing Abilities at Work Certification, and met with CDI every six weeks for guidance and feedback.
The team will continue cooperation with CDI in 2025 and has invited Patient Advocates into the process.
“We want to be the best we can be for our employees, but we also have a big focus on our patients and families,” said Amy. “With the Patient Advocate group, we’ll have their voice and see what we need to work on as an organization.”
Other immediate to-dos for the team include conducting and analyzing the internal benchmarking survey, improving employee education accessibility and developing more disability inclusion training for frontline staff.
“We already hit the ground running to start the 2025 process!” said Amy.