Inspired To Soar

Something a colleague said to me recently that I haven't stopped thinking about:

"We keep training individual clinicians to be culturally competent within systems that are structurally incompetent."

That sentence holds a lot.

We can invest in individual awareness, implicit bias training, cultural sensitivity workshops, and all of that has value. But if the referral pathways, the data collection systems, the research priorities, the workforce demographics, and the leadership structures remain unchanged, we are asking individuals to compensate for systemic failure.

And that is not sustainable. And it is not equitable.

Here's the bit I keep coming back to:

No single training session, however well designed, can claim to fully grasp the nuances and depth of a culture.

Culture isn't a competency you tick off and complete. It's lived, layered, and constantly evolving, and treating it as something you can master in a workshop is part of how we end up here: individuals carrying the weight of systems that were never built to hold it.

That's the shift I try to help organisations make.

From individual-level interventions to structural accountability.

From training days to policy change.

From good intentions to measurable outcomes.

Both matter. But one without the other isn't enough.

What does structural accountability look like in your organisation?

I'm genuinely curious. 💬

P.S. In keeping with everything I preach about rest and sustainable leadership, I am practising it too. I'm stepping away for a short while to recharge properly.

I'll be back soon, refreshed and ready to keep serving this community.

Let's talk about cultural safety, humility and understanding, and why I've largely moved away from the term "cultural competence."

"Competence" implies a fixed endpoint. A certificate. A training day completed. A box ticked.

But working effectively with people from diverse backgrounds isn't a skill you acquire and then possess. It's a practice. It's ongoing. It requires humility, the recognition that you don't have all the answers, and that the people you're serving are experts in their own experiences.

Cultural humility, cultural safety and structural competency are the frameworks I find more useful. They ask harder questions. They don't let organisations off the hook with a one-day training programme.

Cultural safety, in particular, asks: does this patient feel safe? Do they feel respected? Do they feel that their identity, all of it, is accepted in this clinical encounter?

If the answer is no, it doesn't matter how culturally competent the clinician believes themselves to be.

The standard is set by the patient, not the provider.

As I close out this season of content, one thing I want to leave you with:

Racial health equity is not a specialist topic.

It is not something that only applies to organisations with large ethnic minority populations. It is not a problem that belongs to a diversity team or an equality lead. It is not resolved by one training day, one report, or one well attended event.

It is the ongoing work of every person and every organisation that is serious about the claim that health is a universal right.

If you are a healthcare professional: this is your work.
If you are a researcher: this is your work.
If you are a leader: this is especially your work.
If you commission services or sit on a board: this is very much your work.

And if you're not sure where to start, I'm here. That's what Inspired To Soar exists for.

Thank you for being in this community. Thank you for caring about this. Let's keep going together. 💜

[email protected] | inspiredtosoar.co.uk

Something I want to be intentional about: celebrating progress, even when the work is far from finished.

It's easy, and sometimes right, to focus on the gap between where we are and where we need to be. The urgency is real. The stakes are real.

But if we never pause to name what's changed, we risk burning out on a journey that has no visible milestones.

So let me name a few things:

The Anti-Racist Wales Action Plan exists, and in Wales, that is genuinely significant.

The Seen. Heard. Valued event happened, and those community voices are now on record in a published report.

Healthcare professionals are increasingly showing up for conversations they would have avoided a decade ago.

Organisations are starting to ask harder questions about their data.

None of this is enough. But all of it matters. And the people who made it possible deserve to have that acknowledged.

Keep going, change-makers. The journey is long. But we are not where we were. 💜

A question I get asked often: "Where should we start?"

My answer is always the same: start with an honest assessment of where you actually are.

Not where you'd like to be. Not where your equality policy says you should be. Where you actually are.

That means looking at your patient outcome data, disaggregated by ethnicity. It means asking whether your community engagement has been genuinely co produced or largely consultative. It means examining your workforce demographics, your board composition, and your research participation rates.

The gaps that emerge from that honest assessment become your starting point. Not a curriculum someone else designed for a generic audience.

At Inspired To Soar, this is often where my work with organisations begins: taking a proper look at what is happening before deciding what needs to change.

If your organisation is ready to start that conversation, I'd genuinely love to hear from you.

[email protected] 📩

I've been thinking about what makes equity training actually work.

Not just leave people feeling informed but actually shift something. Change behaviour. Change culture. Change outcomes.

A few things I've learned:

✅ It has to be grounded in evidence, not just good intentions. People need to understand the data behind the disparities, not just be asked to feel differently about them.

✅ It has to be relevant to the specific context. Generic diversity training often fails because it doesn't connect to the actual systems, structures, and daily decisions of the people in the room.

✅ It has to create psychological safety. People won't engage honestly if they're afraid of saying the wrong thing. A good facilitator makes it safe to be uncomfortable.

✅ It has to lead somewhere. Training that ends in the room doesn't change organisations. There must be a bridge to action, to policy, to practice, to accountability.

This is the standard I hold my work at Inspired To Soar to. And it's what I'd ask you to look for in any training you commission.

If your organisation is ready to take this important step, send an email to: [email protected]

Looking forward to speaking on this important topic 👍🏾😊.

Meet our speaker, Bami Adenipekun Inspired To Soar , an award-winning author, patient advocate, health equity consultant, and founder of Inspired To Soar, UK. With extensive experience addressing healthcare inequalities and championing meaningful patient involvement, she brings a unique perspective shaped by both professional expertise and lived experience.

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