Health Promotion - Disease Prevention

Effective Communication Tools 2016 Transcript

Speaker 1: [foreign language 00:00:04]

Speaker 2: [foreign language 00:00:07]

Speaker 3: Effective healthcare communication policies and practices including provider health literacy contribute to improving the quality of services for culturally and linguistically diverse populations, as well as people with limited health literacy skills. At HRSA, we view healthcare communication as a synergy of three factors. Health literacy, cultural competency and linguistic competency. It is important to emphasize a dynamic view of healthcare communication.

Speaker 4: These three factors interplay with each other in dynamic ways.

Speaker 1: [foreign language 00:01:00]

Speaker 4: For example, a person's health literacy may be influenced by sociocultural factors including education, income, country of origin, level of assimilation to the host culture to name a few.

Speaker 3: Cultural factors not only include language, gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation and gender identity, but also physical and mental capacity, age, religion, housing status and regional differences.

Speaker 4: Culture also includes diversity within specific cultural and ethnic groups. Even the culture of Western medicine. All of the factors that I've mentioned are very dynamic and highly interdependent. They are difficult to isolate and they tend to interact and influence each other. It is important to note that low health literacy is not language dependent. Additionally, culture seems to be a prime mediator among these various factors.

Speaker 3: The United States is becoming even more linguistically and culturally diverse. The number of people who speak a language other than English at home has more than doubled in the last three decades and at a pace four times greater than the nation's population growth. In that time frame, the percentage of non-English language speakers grew by 140%, while the nation's overall population grew by 34%.

Speaker 5: So she says in this moment she's feeling better. Yesterday she felt a little bit of pain but she's feeling much better today.

Speaker 6: In her chest?

Speaker 4: The unprecedented rise in our nation's non-English speakers calls for rapid and innovative responses on the part of healthcare systems to ensure that trained healthcare interpreters are immediately available when required. Health Equity is attainment of the highest level of health for all people.

Speaker 3: A disparity is a particular type of health difference that is closely linked with social or economic disadvantage. Health disparities adversely affect groups of people who have systematically experienced greater social and economic obstacles to health. HRSA views effective cross cultural communication as health disparity, quality, safety, and civil rights issues. Health literacy must be viewed within a cultural context.

Speaker 4: The HRSA mission statement is the framework that supports a health care system that ensures access to comprehensive culturally competent quality care in order to fully integrate cultural and linguistic competence and health literacy factors into HRSA funding opportunity announcements, new suggested guidelines have been developed to improve the effectiveness of healthcare communication between providers and their patients. Programs are encouraged to apply these principles whenever appropriate in their policies and practices.

Speaker 3: Please remember that these are guidelines and suggestions for preparing responsive applications. They are not directives. Feel free to contact the name listed in the funding opportunity announcement for further clarification regarding this effective healthcare communication policy. Also available on these web pages are links to other public resources and tools of cultural competence, linguistic competence, and health literacy that we have found for you to use.

We encourage you to use these things to assist in the preparation of your application.