One Size Does Not Fit All: Diverse Populations Pose Special Health Needs
Joint Commission Report Provides Tool to Assess and Overcome Language, Cultural Barriers
As the face of America continues to change, a research report released today by The Joint Commission, entitled "One Size Does Not Fit All: Meeting the Health Care Needs of Diverse Populations," urges health care organizations to assess their capacity to meet patients' unique cultural and language needs. In its 2001 report "Crossing the Quality Chasm," the Institute of Medicine identified patient-centered and equitable care as important elements of quality. The report includes a self-assessment tool that can help health care organizations tailor their initiatives to meet the needs of diverse populations. The tool addresses the main issues found in the report and provides a framework for discussing needs, resources and goals for providing the highest quality care to every patient served.
"Before meeting the treatment needs of patients, effective communication with them is needed in order to understand what the health problem is and how they wish to go about addressing that health problem," says Mark R. Chassin, M.D., M.P.P., M.P.H., president, The Joint Commission. "By using this framework, hospitals can assess their current practices and take action to treat each patient as a unique individual."
"This report provides many useful examples of how hospitals are effectively addressing the cultural and language needs of their increasingly diverse patients," says Robert Ross, M.D., president and CEO, The California Endowment. "We hope that hospitals across the nation will adopt some of these practices and use the report's self-assessment tool to improve the quality of care that their patients receive.
http://www.jointcommission.org/NR/rdonlyres/88C2C901-6E4E-4570-95D8-B49BD7F756CF/0/HLC_One_Size_PrePub.pdf
Health Literacy and Patient Safety
The Health Literacy and Patient Safety Roundtable met in May and September of 2005. The Roundtable was charged with framing the issues related to low health literacy and its impact on patient safety. The Roundtable discussions culminated in the publication of a white paper, which describes interventions to improve the ability of patients to understand complex medical information, and provide recommendations for a broad range of health care stakeholders and policymakers to mitigate the risks to patients with low health literacy and/or low English proficiency. The Joint Commission and Joint Commission Resources hosted a national symposium on health literacy and patient safety in June of 2006. Information gained from the symposium contributed to the content of the white paper, "What Did the Doctor Say?: Improving Health Literacy to Protect Patient Safety"
http://www.mmia.org/uploads/docs/improving_health_literacy.pdf
A Snapshot of a Nation
A new report from the Joint Commission recommends strategies to address the language and cultural issues that challenge hospitals as they strive to deliver safe, effective care to diverse patient populations. For example, the report recommends that hospitals serving diverse populations establish a centralized program to coordinate services relating to language and culture; implement a uniform framework for systematic collection of data on race, ethnicity and language; and provide ongoing training to staff on how and when to access language services. The recommendations are based on a study of how 60 hospitals are providing health care to culturally and linguistically diverse patient populations. "These findings cannot be generalized to all hospitals, but they provide detailed information about many ways that culture and language issues are being addressed in hospitals," the authors say.
http://www.jointcommission.org/NR/rdonlyres/E64E5E89-5734-4D1D-BB4D-C4ACD4BF8BD3/0/hlc_paper.pdf
Hospitals, Language, and Culture Project Update - October 2007
Hospitals, Language, and Culture Project Update for October 2007 from The Joint Commission. To download please go to: http://www.jointcommission.org/NR/rdonlyres/E46ED01D-EA80-4A7E-BB7D-DA543AD3DFEC/0/hlc_update.pdf
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