Language Services Improvement Collaborative

Community health centers (CHCs) take pride in delivering culturally competent health care and are attentive to the health literacy of their patients. Despite this, it still remains a challenge to provide sufficiently qualified interpreter services to the volume of patients requesting this service. While Massachusetts law has only mandated hospitals to provide qualified interpreter services for certain services, provision of language services has evolved as an important health policy priority in order to reduce health disparities both national and locally. For example, the Joint Commission has developed accreditation standards and NCQA has included identification of patients needing interpreters as one of its ten standards for the medical home. Many CHCs hire bilingual staff to meet the interpretation needs of patients. However, there is great variability in the prerequisite bilingual skills of these staff and in the intensity of interpreter training that they receive. Many primary care providers at CHCs are also multilingual, yet most CHCs lack systems to ensure that these providers are sufficiently bilingual to provide qualified services in these languages.

Six Massachusetts community health centers were involved in this learning collaborative. The teams involved had to conduct an organizational needs assessment, develop a language service plan that fits the needs of their organization's priorities and needs, evaluate and assess organizational performance utilizing PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) rapid cycle improvement plans, and lastly develop an improvement plan for language services delivery.