1. Understanding and Implementing the CLAS Standards
Standard 12: Community Partnerships for CLAS (guideline)
Cont.
Methods for Involving the Community
Other approaches to involving community leaders and patients
in partnerships to improve healthcare organizations’ cultural competence are available.
Community forums. Providers could invite community leaders to participate in the organizations’ own ongoing planning groups for designing strategies to achieve cultural competence. In addition, the actual presence of representatives of healthcare organizations in the community can be invaluable. For instance, community leaders and organizations could offer their facilities to cosponsor community forums with the healthcare organization, giving patients a comfortable venue where they can express their needs and concerns about healthcare delivery in their area.
Churches. Churches can often serve as useful partners in sponsoring interactions between healthcare organizations and communities. Many churches also provide social and health services that could be linked to, or supported by, healthcare organizations.
Employees. In both large and small organizations, including small physician practices, community members who are knowledgeable about cultural health beliefs could serve as advisers and trainers for healthcare organizations’ cultural competence training fro staff. The organization or practice could also train and hire community members to work as receptionists, outreach workers, and interpreters.
Patient questionnaires. When patients come to a healthcare facility, they could be asked either to complete short questionnaires about how their needs are being met or to participate in a loosely structured interview with staff before or after their encounters.
Whichever of these, or other approaches, healthcare organizations choose to pursue to promote community involvement, findings of survey, forums, and so forth should be made available to the community. This can help minimize risks of the development of community frustration that patients and consumers have not been able to learn how their input has been utilized.
Community Referrals and Liaisons
Another important issue is the development of relationships with ethnic and community-based providers; this may also afford mainstream providers with expertise on linguistic and cultural competence that may otherwise be difficult and costly to successfully develop in-house. Development of such relationships may also enable healthcare providers to provide better care and outreach to pregnant women and patients with chronic conditions who have limited English proficiency and therefore can be challenging to serve appropriately. Community healthcare workers provided by either provider organizations or third-party payers may represent an effective means of supporting the continuing healthcare needs of all patients from a diversity of communities. [Coye M, Deborah Alarez D, Lewin Group. Medicaid managed care and cultural diversity in California. The Commonwealth Fund. New York, New York;1999.]
