Advanced Effective Communication, Cultural Competence, and ...

A Roadmap for Hospitals
Chapter Six: Organization Readiness
✔ Checklist for Organization
Readiness (continued)
Provision of Care, Treatment, and Services
❑ Create an environment that is inclusive
of all patients.
❑ Develop a system to provide language
services.
❑ Address the communication needs of
patients with sensory or communication
impairments.
❑ Integrate health literacy strategies into
patient discussions and materials.
❑ Incorporate cultural competence and
patient- and family-centered care
concepts into care delivery.
Patient, Family, and Community
Engagement
❑ Collect feedback from patients, families,
and the surrounding community.
❑ Share information with the community
about the hospital’s efforts to meet
unique patient needs.
address, the example practices and methods may not apply to
all hospital types, sizes, or settings.
Recommended Issues and
Related Practice Examples to
Address the Leadership Domain
of Organization Readiness
❑ Demonstrate leadership commitment to
effective communication, cultural
competence, and patient- and familycentered
care.
The buy-in and support from hospital leaders make it
easier to allocate resources and provide services necessary
to meet patient communication, cultural, religious,
spiritual, mobility, or other needs.
• Involve staff at all organization levels in decision
making.
• Encourage leaders to participate in interdisciplinary
patient rounds.
• Communicate leadership commitment to effective
communication, cultural competence, and patientand
family-centered care during new staff orientation.
• Create opportunities for leaders to engage staff on a
regular and ongoing basis (for example, establish
“office hours” with executives or breakfast with the
President [6]).
• Identify an individual(s) directly accountable to
leadership for overseeing hospital efforts to advance
effective communication, cultural competence, and
patient- and family-centered care.
• Incorporate community benefit reporting into the
design and implementation of services that address
barriers to care (as required of non-profit hospitals by
the Internal Revenue Service [7]).
• Integrate the Office of Minority Health’s National
Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate
Services (known as the CLAS standards) into the
hospital’s services, programs, and initiatives [8].
❑ Integrate unique patient needs into new
or existing hospital policies.
Hospitals should develop new or modify existing policies
and procedures to incorporate the concepts of effective
communication, cultural competence, and patient- and
family-centered care.
• Incorporate information about providing communication
assistance to patients whose preferred language is not
English or who have sensory or communication impairments
into applicable hospital policies and procedures.*
• Define family to explicitly include any individual that
plays a significant role in the patient’s life such as
spouses, domestic partners, significant others (of both
different-sex and same-sex), and other individuals not
legally related to the patient. Use this expanded definition
in all hospital policies, including those addressing
visitation, access to chosen support person, identification
of surrogate decision-makers and advance directives. †
* See the Chapter 6: Organization Readiness: Provision of Care, Treatment, and Services (page 40 and 41) for additional information on providing
language services and communication assistance.
† On April 15, 2010, President Obama released a presidential memorandum for the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services
respecting the rights of hospital patients to receive visitors and to designate surrogate decision-makers for medical emergencies regardless of their
status of legally recognized immediate family members (available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/presidential-memorandumhospital-visitation).
(Accessed on July 22, 2010.)
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