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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Kaiser Communicates With Patients En Espanol

More than half of the workforce at Kaiser Permanente, which is the largest nonprofit health care organization in the country, is made up of ethnic minorities, as is half of its board of directors. Nearly 70 percent of Kaiser’s managers are women. The company, which ranked 27th in “DiversityInc.’s” Top 50 Companies in 2007, has certified nearly 3,000 of its employees with bilingual skills. The company also runs a myriad of programs to serve its large population of patients who are members of ethnic minorities. According to Dr. Christian Gastelum, an internist at Kaiser Permanente in Panorama City and chair of its Diversity Committee, those programs include providing physicians with culturally competent handbooks to educate them about cultural norms and about illnesses that are more prevalent in certain ethnicities. The Diversity Committee, Gastelum said, was formed to ensure Kaiser provides culturally competent care to its patients, which includes posting bilingual signs and making sure patients have access to interpretative and translation services. Kaiser is implementing a service in which interpreters will be available to join patients during their appointments to better communicate with physicians. “It’s something I don’t think anyone else offers,” Gastelum said. The large health care organization also established centers of excellence in culturally competent care, which are health care facilities that develop and utilize culturally-influenced clinical practices. The organization also prints a myriad of cross-cultural publications. “Everything soon will be put in all the threshold languages at all the medical centers,” Gastelum said. Kaiser has also established a Latino Center of Excellence in Colorado. According to Virginia H. Baca, communications manager for the Panorama City Medical Center Area of Kaiser Permanente, the center focuses on health issues that are of primary concern to Latinos, such as diabetes, and offers health education classes in Spanish. Kaiser’s Diversity Committee, along with its health education program, helped create KP Kids to teach children of all ethnicities good eating habits. The bilingual program “has been so successful that other medical centers are adopting it in their facilities,” Baca said. Gastelum, who teaches a diabetes health education class in Spanish, said that Kaiser is also adopting a database of all its patients’ ethnic and religious backgrounds to better serve them. When he is asked why Kaiser provides multilingual services to its patients, Gastelum responds, “Members who speak Spanish expect the same services as our members who speak English. They’re our patients. They’re our members. You can’t turn them away. You want to take care of them the best you can.”

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