Cultural Programs
The Cultural Fluency group, since its inception, has worked towards making culture and language a regular part of healthcare services. Some of the initial initiatives focused on providing cultural information about specific groups to providers, thus increasing the knowledge of how to work with culturally different patients. The most recent focus of the group has focused on access to healthcare, specific to language access. Interpreter training and medical vocabulary development classes have been offered to over 300 bilingual people over the last 3 years. The interpreter training classes have introduced industry standards of the interpreting profession and the medical vocabulary classes helped interpreters increase their vocabulary development in healthcare specific areas such as orthopedics, cardiology, birthing, pediatrics, etc. In addition, provider education on the legal mandates of providing interpretation services and how to work with interpreters has been offered to the community. A CD-Rom of this information is available (LINK?) Additionally, a one-page fact sheet on how lack of quality interpretation services affects the entire community was created (LINK?)
The CF group, thanks to an Empowerment grant, was also able to translate documents related to maternal health into Arabic, Bosnian/Serbo-Croatian, and Vietnamese. In addition to translating the documents into the above languages, the Baby Wellness series were put onto a CD-Rom in American Sign Language. This allows for Deaf patients to view this information in their native language. The beauty of this work is that all of the documents selected were universal and can be used by any facility or person. (LINK to the translated documents and cd?)
