An Evaluation of a Well-Baby Educational Program for Spanish-Speaking Patients at UNC Health Care

Background: Spanish-speaking mothers have identified Spanish communication as key to receiving patient-centered care. A disparity exists between the amount of maternal health education that Latina mothers would like to receive and the amount that they do receive. Program description: Ready, Set, Baby (RSB) is “an educational program designed to counsel prenatal women about maternity care best practices and the benefits and management of breastfeeding.” The Women’s Health Information Center (WHIC) at the North Carolina Women’s Hospital established a pilot program to provide RSB education to Spanish-speaking mothers using volunteer educators. Evaluation questions: What are the processes for recruiting, training, and managing volunteers, and conducting RSB sessions? What are stakeholder perceptions of these processes? Overall, how can the program improve? Methods: Semi-structured key informant interviews.Findings: Current processes for recruitment, training, management, and RSB sessions were modeled. Stakeholders identified positive aspects, such as flexibility and leveraging organizational strengths. Stakeholders identified negative aspects, including unclear ownership of processes, lack of communication, redundancies, and inconsistencies. Stakeholders also made recommendations for process improvements. Implications: Updated processes that reflected stakeholders’ recommendations were developed and will be implemented. Other collaborative programs should ensure clear division of responsibilities, eliminate redundancies between organizations, and leverage each organization’s strengths to facilitate effective collaboration. Other volunteer-based language-access programs should create processes that are flexible to meet the differing needs of native- and non-native speaker volunteers, mandate standardized proof of language proficiency, and investigate the care-seeking patterns of their target population.Bachelor of Science in Public Healt