Worth a Look: Communication Collaboration

Language barriers between caregivers and patients can be more than just an annoyance. A hospital’s quality of care can suffer without reliable language services to help clinicians communicate with limited-English-proficiency patients. One study in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, showed that 63 percent of interpreter errors were serious enough to have medical consequences.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Speaking Together: National Language Services Network, is a 10-hospital collaborative aimed at helping hospitals improve language services, develop performance measurements and share best practices. Participating facilities focus on specific clinical areas—such as cardiovascular disease or depression—to demonstrate how care quality can be affected by communication improvements.

Think your hospital could use a hand assessing the quality of its language services? Check out www.speakingtogether.org to see some performance improvement measures and read about pilot initiatives at participating hospitals.

—Jay Moore