All Entries Tagged With: "culturally appropriate care"

Joint Commission and HHS publish new video to improve patient-provider communication, reduce disparities in care

The Joint Commission and Health and Human Services released yesterday a 30-minute series of videos titled Improving Patient-Provider Communication: Joint Commission Standards and Federal Laws. The videos, which can be found on YouTube, were created out of recognition that there are a lack of resources out there that touch on methods for improving communication between patients and their providers for non English speaking patients, and patients who are hard of hearing. Additionally, the are many current regulations surrounding those topics, and The Joint Commission is developing a set of standards surrounding cultural competence, patient-centered care, and effective communication.

The project runs through January 2010. It will attempt to address how better to incorporate health literacy, culture, and diversity into Joint Commission standards. You can read more about the project here.

Should physicians be required to take cultural competency courses?

 It’s widely reported that racial and ethnic minorities receive less comprehensive healthcare than white patients. Some states have tried to address this by requiring physicians to undergo cultural competency training. Both California and New Jersey require such training and Maryland strongly recommends it. Nine other states are considering requiring some sort of cultural competency training.

However, an article in this week’s American Medical News points out that many physicians are opposed to such legislation mainly because it’s another topic around which they have to be educated. California and New Jersey have taken different approaches to mandating cultural competency training. California requires continuing medical education (CME) courses to contain information that is culturally and clinically relevant. New Jersey requires a specific amount of CME credits that must be earned in courses around cultural content as defined by the state medical board.

Some physicians opposed to the increased amount of cultural competence training wonder when the CME requirements will end and say that some requirements may not line up with what is clinically relevant. On the flip side, other physicians who are for such requirements say that without these mandates, most physicians would ignore the topic completely.

What does your state require? Do you think topic-specific CME mandates such as cultural competence are necessary for physicians? What about other healthcare workers?

Joint Commission requests feedback on cultural, communication standards

The Joint Commission asked yesterday for review from the field of its newly released proposed standards in effective communication, cultural competence, and patient-centered care. The standards, which would not be implemented until January 2011 at the earliest, represent an effort by The Joint Commission to place a greater emphasis on addressing disparities in care for certain patient populations. The standards also recognize how important solid communication is to delivering safe patient care, and that often communication can be ineffective with patients who face language, cultural, or physically debilitating barriers.

For the most part, the ideas behind these proposed standards are not completely new to The Joint Commission. There are existing standards that target the need for effective communication, patient-centered care, and cultural sensitivity. However, this will be the first time that these are specifically called out as an area of focus. The proposed standards encompass revisions and additions to 17 chapters for hospitals.

The proposed revisions can be found on The Joint Commission’s Web site.

Seems to me that this is more positive change coming from The Joint Commission. What are your thoughts? Do more standards not always mean good things? In this case, I think it will be a welcome addition to the existing standards.

Check out this HealthLeaders Media article on the topic as well, it provides some more detail.

NQF endorses patient-centered care guidelines

The National Quality Forum (NQF) this week endorsed 45 guidelines designed to help hospitals provide patient-centered and culturally appropriate care. The practices cover issues such as communication, community engagement, data collection and quality improvement, leadership, care delivery, and workforce training.

Individual guidelines suggest efforts such as partnering with community organizers to reach diverse populations, translating written materials into languages used by the local community, and implementing strategies to recruit and retain employees who reflect local community demographics.

The guidelines were introduced to help facilities reduce disparities in healthcare among racial and ethnic minorities, who face disproportionately higher rates of disease, disability, and mortality.