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Pride Month Spotlight: MetroHealth’s Nic Sukalac

June 26, 2024
Andrea Lugo

Each June, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning and/or Queer (LGBTQ+) Pride Month celebrates LGBTQ+ people and honors decades of activism for equitable treatment and care for all. At the forefront of all essential hospitals is the mission to aid and care for the nation’s marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ patients. Essential hospitals also work to ensure safe, positive work environments for staff throughout all the stages in their personal lives.

For Nic Sukalac, MBA, who serves as senior vice president, provider enterprise operations at association member The MetroHealth System, in Cleveland, that mission is personal. Sukalac came out as a transgender, nonbinary person in 2023.

“I’m incredibly grateful to our CEO, Airica Steed, EdD, MBA, RN, and our executive leadership team and so many colleagues around the organization who responded to my coming out with affirmation and encouragement,” says Sukalac, who has worked at MetroHealth for 17 years. “I feel very fortunate to work for an organization that has had these tenets of equity, inclusion, and diversity built into our framework for the entire history of our organization.”

MetroHealth has a long history of caring for LGBTQ+ patients; in 2007, the health system opened the region’s first dedicated clinic for LGBTQ+ care. Aside from their regular duties working with providers to oversee administrative functions and operations, Sukalac serves as the executive sponsor of MetroHealth’s Pride Alliance employee business resource group (EBRG). The Pride Alliance aims to support and affirm LGBTQ+ employees and cascade that affirmation into the way the system engages with patients and the community.

Sukalac shared more about their experience coming out and how MetroHealth seeks to care for and protect LGBTQ+ patients and staff.

What’s something that surprised you throughout your transition?

I spent a lot of time in introspection and working through, internally, my readiness to come out publicly. I thought that I was prepared and ready to take this step, but there’s obviously a big difference from thinking it in your head and living it.

As I began the conversations with colleagues at MetroHealth, I was not prepared for the number of people who I hadn’t been closely working with who maybe saw something about [my transition] secondhand, learned about it, and reached out to me and told me about their own experiences.

That was incredibly powerful. I felt like I was going to receive support from our leadership team. I felt like I had the relationships and the rapport. It’s not that I didn’t expect to receive positive feedback from others in the organization, but there were so many people who just reached out and said, “Thank you for helping to make LGBTQ+ people visible in leadership.”

People reached out not only to say, “Thank you,” or “I appreciate you,” or “I value you,” but to say, “How are you doing?”

I’ll give credit to our Pride Alliance leadership team who were very quick to reach out and say, “How are you doing? This is big, and this is impacting you. How can the community support you?” I thought I was maybe prepared to deal with all the emotions that would be going on through this. But as I started the communications, it was a lot.

What were some of the challenges you faced during and after your transition?

I came out as a long-term member of the leadership team at MetroHealth, and I think overall this made for a positive experience given that I had built relationships and trust with colleagues throughout the organization. Because many people knew me before I came out, there’s still an ongoing process [of] using the correct name, pronouns, gender identity, and so on. It is a balance. It was like people knew me and so they said, “You’re you and we enjoy working with you and we respect you, whoever you are.” But it’s been a continual process of education around using correct pronouns and understanding gender identity.

How do different departments across MetroHealth collaborate to ensure a continuum of support?

There’s close coordination between our Pride Alliance EBRG, our Pride Network, and our Office of Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity and People Division team in the organization. On June 29, we are hosting our ninth annual transgender job fair on our main campus. We invite other local employers and workforce development organizations to partner with us and create a safe space where we can connect affirming employers with trans job seekers for opportunities across northeast Ohio. That’s been a really incredible collaboration between internal groups as well as with the broader community to really, especially during Pride month, take this time to empower the trans community and get them connected with meaningful career opportunities. Additionally, employees from around the organization recently participated in the Pride in the CLE celebration at the beginning of June.

In what ways does MetroHealth ensure its LGBTQ+ patients feel supported?

As Cleveland’s first hospital to provide services specifically to the LGBTQ+ community, MetroHealth has been a leader in supporting our patients being seen, being heard, and ultimately being well as they live their authentic lives. MetroHealth offers the full spectrum of care to the LGBTQ+ community including Kids Pride, adult primary and specialty care services, and gender affirming medical and surgical care.

MetroHealth also has recognized the need to go beyond medical care to partner with others in the community to address social determinants of health. The Institute for HOPE helps patients with nonmedical needs, including healthy food, stable housing, and job training.

Our CEO, Dr. Steed, has focused MetroHealth on eradicating health disparities. Considering the complexity and intersectionality of LGBTQ+ care with racial, ethnic, and cultural identities, working intentionally and personally with this population is an incredibly important component of our strategy to ensure equitable care for all. Recognizing unique aspects of patients’ identities, honoring their lived experiences, and allowing us to connect them with the best treatments, tools, and resources that align with who they are — that’s where we want to go as a health system. I’m proud to work in a place [where] that is such a key focus.

Recognizing unique aspects of patients’ identities, honoring their lived experiences, and allowing us to connect them with the best treatments, tools, and resources that align with who they are — that’s where we want to go as a health system. I’m proud to work in a place [where] that is such a key focus.

Nic Sukalac, MBA, senior vice president, provider enterprise operations at association member The MetroHealth System

I view MetroHealth’s commitment to LGBTQ+ patients as an essential hospital to be so critical. We are the go-to resource for our communities, and I am incredibly proud and grateful to work with such a dedicated team of caregivers who walk the talk in providing outstanding care to all our patients.

LGBTQ+ health care has been at the center of political discussions in recent years. How does MetroHealth navigate those conversations on the legislative front?

We’re obviously in a place where both nationally and in the state of Ohio, there’s been very concerning legislation recently that moves in the wrong direction when it comes to LGBTQ patient care. MetroHealth has been active from a government relations standpoint in telling the story of our patients and in sharing the expertise of our clinicians to make sure that the legislators and those in power as well as the voters have a clear understanding of what some of these things mean beyond the headlines. As a more mature organization when it comes to LGBTQ care, we see an important role in advocacy at the local, state, and federal levels to advance the cause of equality. That’s certainly an ongoing work in progress [and] an area that there’s constant review on because there is so much happening in this space.

How do you support other LGBTQ+ staff at MetroHealth and ensure they feel comfortable at work?

One recent project was working with our People Division team and Information Services to streamline the process for employee name changes in our system. Through our Pride Alliance EBRG, we heard from employees about challenges in navigating the complex process of working with multiple systems and departments to update their preferred or legal name.

I’m pleased that we just implemented a new policy and procedure recently. Just this week I saw feedback from an employee who went through it and said it was completely smooth, it was easy, and everything’s updated in the system. While in some ways it sounds like maybe a smaller win, when it comes to having employees feel truly seen, their name is obviously a key part of it, and having their name reflect how they identify is so important.

I don’t think until I actually came out [did I realize] how much not being able to bring my full self to work had impacted me, so anything that I or MetroHealth can do to create an environment where patients and our staff feel safe is so very important. I aspire to support an environment where people don’t have to spend decades feeling like they have to hide. Coming out in my forties was not easy given the identity that I had masked for a very long time. [We’re] trying to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to, from day one, make it clear to employees that this is a place where you belong, and that all facets of diversity are beautiful and powerful and important ways for us to move forward in delivering care for our communities and our patients. That’s really what it’s all about for me. While it can be disheartening to see some of the challenges that our community continues to face and to feel the division and polarization occurring in our society, what I come back to as my grounding principle and my guiding philosophy each day is that love wins.

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