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Increasing the diversity of the healthcare workforce is often cited as a strategy for reducing racial and ethnic health disparities. Colleges and universities are uniquely positioned to influence workforce diversity through their recruitment, admissions, and student support practices, and by partnering with community groups to improve the pipeline of underrepresented racial/ethnic (URE) students pursuing health careers and influence workforce diversity practices in healthcare institutions. In this article, the authors describe a multifaceted initiative implemented by the Academic Health Center (AHC) at the University of Cincinnati (UC) that sought to address each of these areas. The initiative was led by the dean of the College of Nursing and a professor from the College of Medicine, who served as co-principal investigators. Within the university, UC identified improving health disparities and workforce diversity as central to its mission, adopted holistic admissions practices, used social media to strengthen outreach to URE students, and created a diversity dashboard to monitor diversity efforts. Additionally, UC partnered with community groups to expand pipeline programs for URE students and worked with a community advisory board to engage the region's health systems in evaluating their workforce diversity efforts. Within the College of Nursing, the initiative resulted in increased applications from students at pipeline schools, a larger number of URE student admissions, and increased faculty diversity.

There exists a gap in the preparation of emergency department (ED) employees to prevent, manage, and recover from workplace violence (WPV). Thus, the purpose of this article is to evaluate learning outcomes following a 4-unit WPV educational program. A quasi-experimental study was used to evaluate learning outcomes with 315 employees from 3 EDs. Units 1-3 were web-based and included a pretest-posttest. Unit 4 was classroom-based and allowed employees to apply the knowledge learned during the web-based program. A paired samples t tests reflected a significant increase in knowledge attainment (p < 0.001). There was no significant difference in knowledge attainment between employees who completed the web-based learning only and employees who completed the hybrid web-based/classroom-based education (p = 0.136). A well-developed WPV educational program can achieve significant learning outcomes in ED employees. Web-based learning may be an effective alternative yielding learning outcomes equal to that of a hybrid educational program.

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