California Endowment grant to enhance multi-cultural patient care
The California Endowment awarded Community Regional Medical Center a generous grant to measure and evaluate the hospital staff’s cultural competency – and eventually to better educate caregivers about patients’ perceptions and cultural practices.
The grant was sought last year as a way to help enhance patient care. Ohio-based consulting firm CMCHO, or the Center for Multicultural Competence in Healthcare Organizations, was hired to help query Community’s patients, employees and physicians.
Community serves an area that has lower incomes, is less educated, is more likely to speak a language other than English and is predominantly non-white, compared to the state or nation as a whole. Students at the largest local school district, Fresno Unified, speak more than a 100 different languages and many are immigrants from countries with different approaches to medical care. Because of the challenges in the region, the Valley also has some of the highest asthma, obesity and diabetes rates in the state.
“It’s not enough for the hospital to just have interpreters on stand-by to translate a doctor’s instructions or explain medical choices,” said Jack Chubb, CEO of Community Regional. “In order to provide a higher level of care for our diverse patient population, we must also understand how different cultures approach health care, perceive and describe pain, delegate decision-making within families and deal with birth and death.”
The California Endowment grant allows Community Regional to do a comprehensive assessment of the capacity and capability of hospital staff, physicians and volunteers to serve its multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-racial patient population. Community’s goal is to design and implement comprehensive cultural training for employees and physicians.
“We have a unique opportunity to become a national health care leader in this arena – especially because of the distinctive demographics of our region,” Chubb said.
Consulting firm CMCHO has been surveying and interviewing Community employees, organizing focus group discussions with local community groups. CMCHO will soon be conducting phone call surveys of patients. The survey will ask questions that deal with race, class, language, gender, income, religious affiliations, education and culture.
The California Endowment is a private, statewide health foundation that was created in 1996 by Blue Cross of California. Its mission is to expand access to affordable, quality health care for underserved individuals and communities, and to promote fundamental improvements in the health status of all Californians.
This story was reported by Erin Kennedy. She can be reached at ekennedy@communitymedical.org.