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Teaching
Tools, Strategies, and Resources, continued
Facilitated
Exercises and Activities |
Exercise
1. Planning Language Services for Linguistically Diverse Groups
 Note to faculty,
trainers, and facilitator
Prior to engaging
in this exercise, it would be helpful for the
trainees to have available the CLAS standards relating to the
provision of linguistic services as well as the DHHS Civil
Rights Guidance on the provision of language services. These
could be
used as a basis for preliminary discussion. This comprehensive
exercise provides: 1) detailed steps in developing a language
plan and 2) opportunities to apply the language planning process
in 4 different scenarios.
Overview
In
response to the DHHS Civil Rights regulations and CLAS standards,
health and mental health care organizations need to strategize
how to best provide for the communication preferences and
needs of a diverse patient population. Each system or organization
will have different needs, based on the linguistic and
cultural
diversity
of its service population, geographic locale, proportion
of these different groups, age distribution, immigration status
(immigrant,
refugee, or asylee), and other demographic factors. Based
on
these factors, systems and organizations need to devise
a plan that will
achieve high quality of care and cost-effectiveness. Here
are the steps:
Step
1. Assess
the pattern of language preferences and needs in the service
locales. This pattern will include
the number
of different
languages spoken, dialectal differences within each language,
and rank by frequency.
Step
2. Assess
the points of service at which the most intense need for language
services occurs (in
a hospital
or clinic
setting, this may be obstetrics and pediatrics). Assess
the points of
service at which the most critical issues relating to
language services
occur, for example, emergency or urgent care services,
and intensive care.
Suggested Strategies
for Implementing Steps 1 and 2
Department
managers or supervisors can be tasked with oversight of this
function. Clinicians and
others who
are on the
frontlines delivering services should be involved
in these activities
and should review the findings for accuracy. Collaborators
with key
stakeholders and constituents within the service
are to
- Acquire
local knowledge or street-level information on patterns
of in-migration
and out-migration within neighborhoods and
communities
- Link
with key informants within culturally and linguistically
diverse communities to ascertain information
on dialectal differences and
local usage.
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