HLT 490: Dissemination of Evidence

Proposed Solution, Implementation, and Evaluation Linh Bui 8/25/2019 HLT 490 Dr. Lilia Chavarria Proposed Solution, Implementation, and Evaluation Proposal As far as healthcare facilities and the delivery of care are concerned, language barriers serve as a serious impediment. This is mainly because language barriers between the staff and the patients that they predominantly serve makes it almost impossible for the patients to articulately describe their conditions to physicians. Similarly, this makes it difficult for both patients and physicians to communicate effectively with each other. In response to this significant barrier to healthcare service deliver, increasing multilingual fluency and cultural competence among healthcare professionals working in multiethnic communities is quintessential to overcoming said barrier (Ahmed, Lee, Shommu, Rumana, & Turin, 2017). In this way, communication between healthcare professionals and patients can be significantly improved, effectively improving service delivery as well. Implementation Plan Obtaining Approval In order to effectively implement the proposed solution, it is necessary to get approval from the organization’s leadership as well as fellow staff. The most effective way to get this approval is by making a presentation to the hospital board alongside the various leaders at the facility on the need of facilitating multilingual fluency and cultural competency among its workforce. In order to demonstrate the value presented in this approach, this presentation will detail the benefits of this approach, how training will be facilitated, as well as the costs that this implementation will incur in both the short-term and in recurring expenditure. When this is compared with the loss of revenue incurred due to language barriers, it will be possible to demonstrate the value of this solution and its pressing need to the facility. Current Problem As far as this facility is concerned, healthcare professionals are not required to demonstrate multilingual capabilities or cultural competency. There are no existing policies, either state-wide or internal that ensure healthcare professionals can remain culturally competent with the communities that they serve. In this way, it becomes extremely difficult to regulate how well facilities and their staff can administer services to the ethnically and culturally diverse communities that they serve. Consequently, there is a need to institute policy changes that require healthcare staff to receive training in an additional language as well as on cultural competency as a means of ensuring they are closer with their patients. This shift will work well to ensure that healthcare professionals in the facility can better serve their communities in spite of their diversity. Proposed Solution In communities where immigrants make up a core part of the demographic, it is imperative to acknowledge the fact that said immigrants will inevitably impact the culture of the community. These impacts spill over into the healthcare sector and can significantly impact the quality of healthcare services that immigrants and their communities receive when they seek healthcare. As such, there is a need to educate the healthcare staff working in the facility on the culture and customs of said immigrants. This is a significant step towards ensuring healthcare workers can better understand the patients that they serve based on a better understanding of the culture, customs, and social dictates of said immigrant patients. In this regard, educational training on cultural competency based on the community in question works well to ensure this goal is realized. At the same time, language forms the basis upon which quality care is delivered to patients. It is almost impossible to provide quality care when healthcare professionals and patients cannot understand each other due to language barriers (Ali & Watson, 2018). While it is important for immigrants to learn the local language, their inability to communicate effectively in said language should not negatively influence the quality of care that they receive. To address this issue, providing language classes to healthcare workers to better serve their immigrant populations is imperative (Ali & Watson, 2018). Notably, most of this training will hinge on having healthcare workers capable of asking basic probing questions and being able to recognize particular signs and symptoms in the language of their immigrants. In these ways, it becomes possible to guarantee that at the very minimum patients and physicians can understand each other in a healthcare setting. Rationale for Proposed Solution Taking into consideration the work of Bowen, it is clear that language barriers between patients and healthcare workers significantly affect communication and by extension the quality of care delivered (2015). In order to address this problem, Chaufan, Chesla, Fielding and Fernandez posit that having physicians as being capable of understanding the language of their immigrants, in this case Spanish, is instrumental to improved patient-physician communication (2013). At the same time, it is vital to note that there are significant non-language barriers that hinder effective care delivery. Dobbins (2015) shows that effective care delivery hinges not only on effective communication, but also on cultural competency from physicians. By better understanding the culture of the immigrant communities they serve, physicians can improve the quality of care provided and patients can enjoy higher rates of satisfaction (Dobbins, 2015). Implementation Logistics In order to ensure success in the implementation of these recommendations, they need to be carefully and successfully integrated into the organizational culture of the facility and become a natural part of the workflow. One of the core ways in which this can be achieved is by ensuring that language training is offered regularly to the staff in a conducive and effective manner. This can happen in two main forms. First, face-to-face language and cultural competency training should be provided to staff members on a rotational basis by a certified expert on the language and culture of the immigrant community in question. For efficiency, staff will undertake said training on a rotational basis to ensure that service delivery is not crippled by regularly scheduled training of staff members. Secondly, it is also vital that staff members are provided with virtual ...