National" Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health Care"

We thought it would be a good idea to comment and expand on each of the 14 Standards CLAS. We will begin with Standard 1:

"Health care organizations should ensure that patients/consumers receive from all staff members effective, understandable, and respectful care that is provided in a manner compatible with their cultural health beliefs and practices and preferred language."

From an organizational perspective, leadership needs to take the primary role in ensuring that all patients/consumers are treated with respect, and services are provided in accordance to their cultural health beliefs, practices, and preferred language. An organization’s leadership serves as a role model for staff to understand, implement, and practice best culturally and linguistic strategies that give results. Health care organizations should create a culture that opens lines of communication among staff and patients, and it is sensitive to the cultural and linguistic needs of the individuals served. It is important to note that cultural competence or understanding cultural competence is not only related to knowing and learning about ethnic or racial groups that migrate to North America. It is also about understanding the cultural nuances and practices of a single population, for instance in North America, Caucasians have difference cultural differences, if you live in the South even the accent varies from those living in the Northeast. In some words, cultural and linguistic competence is about respecting individuals or groups own way of communication and their practices, and approaches to life. Respect is one of the most basic good sense practices that an individual can perform in order to interact with another person. However, cultural and linguistic competence should be a “Mirror Effect” meaning that patients also should invest time in learning about the different cultures that are found in North America such as the society, language, health care system, services, and resources such as organizations. It cannot be one direction, it is should be a “Mirror Effect” for patient’s best interest, benefit, and safety.



Source: National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services
in Health Care. FINAL REPORT U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health. March 2001.

Author:
Helen E. Dao is the President and CEO at her company Dao Management Consulting Services, Inc. (www.daoconsultingservices.com) Helen has been working on cultural diversity and public health strategies development for 11 years. You can follow her on Twitter @ http://twitter.com/#!/daoconsulting and @ her blog http://daoconsultingservices.blogspot.com/

Diversity, Inclusion, Cultural Competence and Linguistic Competence, What Do They Mean?

For decades we have heard the concept "Diversity". In today's businesses, diversity has a much different meaning then before.  Another concept that is taking a strong force is Cultural Competence. There is a clear difference between Diversity and Cultural Competence, however, they are used interchangeably.  Diversity is the distinction of race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, religion, age.  Cultural Competence is a working definition, there are an array to choose from, cultural competence is the set of values, traditions, beliefs, and systems that group of people share.

Another definition that is very important to know and understand is linguistic competence.  The definition of cultural competence by the National Center of Cultural Competence is the ability of an organization and its personnel to understand and convey information that is easily understood by individuals, including Limited English Proficiency. Now let's go back to Diversity and Inclusion at the Workplace.  There cannot be diversity and inclusion without cultural and linguistic competence at the workplace.  Businesses and organizations must pay attention to the cultural differences  among their employees and how it affects management and staff communication as well peer interaction.

Let's look at the following situation.  HR hires a Chinese community educator to train the Chinese community on a specific health condition.  Management ask the educator to develop an educational curriculum for the trainings.  The educator is asked to implement the curriculum in a bilingual format.  The educator asked management in what Chinese dialect should he deliver the training?  Management response is, well you are Chinese, don't you speak Chinese?  The educator responds yes, but I only speak Cantones.  Management finds out that the Chinese community center's patients, the majority speaks Mandarin, two different dialects.

The lesson learned: Businesses and organizations should not make assumptions about their employees' culture and language base on their race or ethnicity.  Therefore, we must move beyond diversity and inclusion, cultural and linguistic competence knowledge is a requirement to do and stay in business.

For more information contact Helen Dao at helen@daoconsultingservices.com.