The First Nordic Leadership Forum: Multicultural management in Health Care took place in Marina Congress Centre, Helsinki, Finland, on October 6th, 2008
The Forum provided insight into the challenges for multicultural leadership in health care. Challenges related to work organisation and management of multicultural working environments were discussed, but so was the potential that multicultural workforce provides also. The health care sector was chosen because it is one of the sectors that are at first instance most affected by employee shortage in all Nordic countries. The speakers were leaders and managers from prominent Nordic hospitals. Also other international experts in the field of leadership provided concrete illustrations.
Institutional discrimination can happen in many ways, and is often unintentional. For example, a hospital might not have taken into account that employees from different ethnic or religious backgrounds might need prayer facilities and breaks or have specific dietary restrictions. Much of recruitment can also happen through informal channels ('who knows who'), and such networks are often rather exclusive for foreigners.
For a foreigner, working in health care in the Nordic countries is a challenge in many ways. Those foreigners that have already medical training from their own countries face tests when it comes to the legitimating of their certificates (the outside EU-countries). However, even the foreigners that have been trained in the Nordic countries and have acquired fluency in the language have reported difficulties in obtaining jobs. Often, it is attitudes and prejudices that are the hardest barrier to cross.
Innovative examples were presented in the Forum. In Iceland, an elderly care home had provided foreign nurses with language training while they worked with the patients under supervision. This was found a very effective way for on the other hand learning the language for the foreigners, and the other hand for getting more qualified staff into a profession that suffered from employee shortage. In Norway, a hospital had trained all the managers in multicultural issues, provided language training at working time, and had even designed its own hijab. In Finland and Sweden, some actors had resorted to active campaigns abroad and recruited competent and qualified personnel directly from other countries. In a Danish hospital, foreigners with medical training had a possibility to attend a pilot training project of 4-6 months which eased their integration into the workplace.