Meeting the Linguistic and Cultural Needs of Clients

As a health care provider, you play a key role in influencing the health and well-being of your clients. However, cultural and linguistic barriers can limit your ability to meet the needs of your clients and can lower the chances clients will benefit from the services you provide them. You can find ways to enhance health care communication, an essential part of providing quality health care. By improving our understanding of cultural and linguistic competency, we can provide high-quality health care that is truly effective, cost-efficient, and most importantly, accessible to the people we serve.

Why the Emphasis on Cultural Competency?

According to a survey done in March, 2003, the US population included over 33.5 million people born in another country, an estimated 11.7 percent, its highest point since 1930. In California, just over one-quarter of Californians were born in another country, a level not seen since the 1890s. Altogether, 13.3 million immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1990s.

But beyond these statistics, the need for cultural and linguistic competence in health care is borne out in daily encounters with clients whether or not they are from immigrant families. According to Human Resources and Services Administration of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a number of specific factors highlight the importance of providing linguistically and cultural competent services:

• The perception of illness and disease and their causes varies by culture.
• Diverse belief systems exist related to health, healing, and wellness.
• Individual preferences and culture affect traditional and non-traditional approaches to health care.
• Culture and personal experiences influence help-seeking behaviors and attitudes towards health care professionals.

All these factors as well as the cultural biases of health care professionals themselves make learning more about providing culturally competent services all the more important.

What is Linguistic and Cultural Competence?

Linguistic and cultural competence is the ability of health care providers to understand and respond effectively to the client’s cultural and linguistic needs. Linguistic and cultural competence requires recognizing and addressing clients’ behaviors, values, practices, attitudes, and beliefs as they affect their reproductive health care.

Being linguistically and culturally competent will lead to improved communication between providers and clients. It’s a win-win proposition. Your clients will benefit from this communication in improved health outcomes and your practice will also benefit because of referrals from your satisfied clients.

What Can You Do?

What are some ways you can demonstrate that you are taking steps to improve health communication?

• Make sure your services are given in a way that fits with your clients’ cultural beliefs, practices, and preferred language.
• Assure that your staff has the chance to expand their cultural knowledge and resources.
• It’s a good idea to recruit staff and board members who reflect the client population you serve.
• Encourage your staff and even your board members to get ongoing cultural competency training.
• Offer interpretation services to your clients.

In addition, you should:

• Make sure your client education materials are easy to read and are in the languages of the people you serve.
• Create signage to meet the multilingual needs of your clients.
• Work with local community groups to develop partnerships to better serve the diverse populations your serve.
• Develop a strategic plan for enhancing your cultural and linguistic competence.

It is important to be able to recognize and address your clients’ reproductive health beliefs and practices in a manner that is sensitive and that honors your clients’ cultural values and norms. Increased linguistic and cultural competence will improve health care access and service delivery for all clients.

New Resource Now Available

The California Department of Public Health’s Family PACT program has recently developed a new Linguistic and Cultural Competency Toolkit to help Family PACT providers assess their organizational strengths and challenges in this area. This Toolkit would be useful for any health care organization looking to improve the linguistic and cultural competency of its staff. It provides a survey tool, instructions for using and scoring the survey as well as how to use the results to develop a strategic plan for improving the agency’s cultural and linguistic competence.

Click on this link to find out more about the new Linguistic and Cultural Competency Toolkit for Family PACT providers.