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Background: Health care organizations need to be responsive to the needs of increasingly diverse patient populations. We compared the contents of six publicly available approaches to organizational responsiveness to diversity. The central questions addressed in this paper are: what are the most consistently recommended issues for health care organizations to address in order to be responsive to the needs of diverse groups that differ from the majority population? How much consensus is there between various approaches?Methods: We purposively sampled six approaches from the US, Australia and Europe and used qualitative textual analysis to categorize the content of each approach into domains (conceptually distinct topic areas) and, within each domain, into dimensions (operationalizations). The resulting classification framework was used for comparative analysis of the content of the six approaches.Results: We identified seven domains that were represented in most or all approaches: organizational commitment, empirical evidence on inequalities and needs, a competent and diverse workforce, ensuring access for all users, ensuring responsiveness in care provision, fostering patient and community participation, and actively promoting responsiveness. Variations in the operationalization of these domains related to different scopes, contexts and types of diversity. For example, approaches that focus on ethnic diversity mostly provide recommendations to handle cultural and language differences; approaches that take an intersectional approach and broaden their target population to vulnerable groups in a more general sense also pay attention to factors such as socio-economic status and gender.Conclusions: Despite differences in labeling, there is a broad consensus about what health care organizations need to do in order to be responsive to patient diversity. This opens the way to full scale implementation of organizational responsiveness in healthcare and structured evaluation of its effectiveness in improving patient outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Children with hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) experience numerous vulnerabilities during transitions from hospital to home during their first year of life. This paper examines the parents' responses to the situations they experience during the initial interstage transition as described through illness blogs. Design and methods: A qualitative descriptive design through inductive theme development using thematic analysis was performed for this study. Text data were used from publically available blogs written by parents of HLHS children on their feelings and experiences during transitions between hospital‐ and home‐care during the interstage period. Results: Six blogs were analyzed. Overall, the lack of difference in normalcy for these parents and their families was apparent. Major themes included: thoughts and feelings when discharged from the hospital, difficulties with hospital readmissions, protecting their child from infection, and developing a support system. Conclusions: Parents looked forward to going home and learned all they could about properly caring for their child before going home. They were disappointed and frustrated when returning to the hospital for either emergency or scheduled admissions and were not prepared to see their child in the intensive care unit environment again. Many parents isolated themselves and avoided the hospital as much as possible to avoid their child developing an infection. All parents had support systems through family and/or friends and found an unexpected sense of support through their blog families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]