December 13, 2006

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — UC Davis Health System has been selected as one of 10 participants in a national program to improve the quality of health care provided to hospital patients with limited English proficiency.

Called Speaking Together: National Language Services Network, the project establishes what will be a high-level learning collaborative that will identify best practices in language services and then share those findings with health professionals across the nation. UC Davis is the only medical center in California selected for the program.

“We are honored to participate in this important effort,” said Claire Pomeroy, vice chancellor for human health sciences and dean of the UC Davis School of Medicine. “The best quality medical care depends on good communication between patients and health-care professionals. Speaking Together represents a path toward our goal of providing outstanding language services to support our excellent medical care.”

Research shows that when patients have difficulty communicating with their health care providers, they are far less likely to understand their conditions, adequately communicate symptoms or adhere to treatment recommendations. While all hospitals nationwide are legally required to provide language services to patients who speak limited English, there are no federal guidelines on the most effective ways to communicate with these patients.

Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, a professor of clinical internal medicine who will direct the Speaking Together Program at UC Davis, noted that language differences represent one of the most obvious barriers to providing quality medical care.

“Family members or hospital staff members who haven't been trained in medical interpretation have all too often served as translators for patients and hospital staff,” said Aguilar-Gaxiola, who also directs the UC Davis Center for Reducing Health Disparities. “While we've essentially eliminated many of those challenges at our medical center in Sacramento, by providing qualified interpreting services we are determined to find even more effective and efficient ways to improving quality medical care.”

UC Davis has more than 40 interpreters on staff, providing translation services in 19 languages. Medical interpreters for Spanish, Russian and Hmong-speaking patients typically are the most requested of the interpretive services at the medical center in Sacramento.

The university has received a grant of $60,000 and will get technical assistance and training using quality improvement measures developed by The George Washington University Department of Health Policy.

The 16-month project will examine how the participating hospitals communicate with non-English-speaking patients, and will focus on how hospital staff can better structure and manage language services programs in order to provide effective, efficient and timely communications.

Ultimately,Speaking Together's work will help develop ways of measuring the quality of language services provided in hospital settings. It is also designed to enable hospitals to set benchmarks and measure the effectiveness of their programs when compared to other hospitals.

Proven best practices identified by the UC Davis Health System and other Speaking Together partners will be shared with health professionals across the nation, giving hospitals that serve linguistically diverse patients tangible and tested examples of effective language services.

Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and administered by The George Washington University's School of Public Health and Health Services, Speaking Together is the latest addition to the foundation's portfolio of programs to improve the quality of health care in America, while eliminating racial and ethnic disparities. Information about Speaking Together is available at www.speakingtogether.org.

The UC Davis Center for Reducing Health Disparities takes a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach to the inequities in health access and quality of care. This includes a comprehensive program for research, education and teaching, and community outreach and information dissemination. The center builds on UC Davis' long history of reaching out to the most vulnerable, underserved populations in the region. For 30 years, its student-run clinics have provided free medical care to Sacramento's underserved communities. A comprehensive medical interpretive services program helps overcome limitations in access for those who don't speak English. Its regional telehealth network provides a high-tech link between UC Davis physicians and smaller clinics around the state that cannot afford to maintain medical specialists on staff. For more information, visit www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/crhd/.