Highlights of Findings

Many California hospitals have recognized the value of providing linguistically appropriate care for their patients and are making strides in addressing the needs of their limited English proficient (LEP) patients. In late 2006 and early 2007, 30 leaders at 20 California hospitals were interviewed for their perspectives and thoughts on making health care available to every individual in a language he or she understands. All 20 hospitals selected for this study had implemented programs designed to facilitate communications between health care providers and LEP patients. Hospitals generally used a combination of telephonic and face-to-face interpreter services to meet their patients ’ needs. In-person interpreters included: • dedicated staff interpreters • outside vendor or independent interpreters • bilingual staff In addition, several hospitals have implemented interpreter services by video. Representatives from the selected hospitals spoke to the benefits and challenges – including relative costs – of the various modes of language services. A summary can be found on pages 6-7. Key to determining the combination of language services that best suits each hospital is being able to track patient needs, language service usage and costs. Respondents also addressed procedural issues, including adopting language access policies, collecting information about patient language needs, establishing language access programs and assessing the impacts of such programs. The individuals contacted for this study were generous in sharing the information they had and lessons learned about improving language access in California hospitals. At the same time, they were all very interested in finding out what others were doing and in building on successful models already in place elsewhere. This issue brief is a step toward meeting that mutual interest in sharing perspectives, challenges, models and best practices