Reference no: EM133129831

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Language Barriers in Rural Communities

Many rural area hospitals in the United States face unique challenges that must be overcome to deliver the highest quality care to patients. Rural areas often experience a lower physician-to-patient ratio than urban areas and have limited access to hiring healthcare workers. Gibson Area Hospital is a small rural facility that provides services for three counties in Illinois. This hospital is the closest hospital to many rural communities. Although they serve the community well, they do lack the capability of providing consistent and accurate services for language barriers. 

The demographics for the community that Gibson Area Hospital serves is less diverse than a more urban area and is primarily Caucasian and English as primary language. GAH does not have a hired translator to help with communication between patient and physician, but they do provide have tools for patients to communicate their language needs to the hospital's staff through hospital brochures, language identification posters, language identification cards and telephone voice menus. (GAHHS.2020) 

Although GAH primarily serves English speaking patients, they do need to be prepared for those patients that will have language barriers or cultural differences. Some hospitals have a bilingual health professional on staff in charge of interpretation. There are variations among the approaches used by rural hospitals in providing linguistically and culturally competent health care for patients in their communities. In addition to language, culturally competent care is needed as well to improve health outcomes. Dissatisfaction with the interpersonal aspects of the medical visits could be the result of cultural cues and language barriers, as a component of social cultural barriers (Lassetter & Baldwin, 2004; Betancourt, Green, Carrillo, Anneh-Firempong, GAH could adopt a performance improvement plan to improve their policies to better serve those patients with language barriers. Some of these changes could include: 

• Create written language assistance policy and procedures
• Establish a coordinator or supervisor of interpreter services
• Establish ethical standards for interpreters
• Create an interpreter services task force
• Translate all written materials (policies, signs, handouts, etc.)
• Encourage hiring of bilingual employees
• Provide cultural competency training
• Effectively monitor need for language assistance programs Hospitals using in-house or contracted interpreters should have an effective method for monitoring and evaluating the interpreting staff.

Hospitals using bilingual employees should clearly articulate in the language assistance policy any additional compensation for those bilingual employees fulfilling dual roles. The interpreter coordinator or Human Resources could work to schedule bilingual employees to provide round-the-clock access to interpreter services. (Torres, Medina, Martin, Johnson, Bellinger, Probst. 2005)

Overcoming language barriers in health-care encounters may be challenging. Effective communication between health-care provider, patient, and families is critical for safe quality care. Health-care organizations should be supported in their efforts to increase awareness of the impact of language barriers and their development of strategies to reduce them. Only then can we ensure quality of care and patient safety for patients with language barriers.