Five Steps to Improving Communications with LEP Populations

Quality health care demands clear communication. Communication problems are at the heart of many sentinel health care events—including unexpected deaths and catastrophic injuries—as well as the consequential legal liability and financial loss for health care providers (The Joint Commission, 2007b). Patients with limited English proficiency (LEP), low literacy, and those who are hearing impaired or have cognitive disabilities pose special communication challenges. Health care organizations and individuals need to develop a capacity to communicate effectively with diverse audiences. Linguistic competency is quickly becoming essential to maintaining quality of care standards and practices. Fortunately, most health care organizations already have the seeds for developing cultural and linguistic competencies to care for today’s diverse patients. These include human resources with diverse language backgrounds and quality improvement technologies; the formal structures and staff dedicated to assure that quality of care standards (either self- or industry-imposed) are met. The recommendations in this tool offer broad national and global perspectives on language diversity and practical action steps that have emerged from our work with Hablamos Juntos demonstrations and focused research on translated materials. These recommendations and action steps are intended to build on existing core competencies by focusing a special lens on the communication needs of LEP patients. They suggest ways in which hospital and health plan administrators, physicians and other health care providers, and other government, insurance and industry professionals can develop linguistic competencies at the individual, organization and industry level