Hospital Assessment Essay Example

National Standard for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Service (CLAS) aims at improving the health standards by providing policies and guidelines aiming at equitable care services to all Americans based on cultural diversity. There is a need to assess our healthcare organisations and facilities to find out to what extent they adhere to the CLAS guidelines as a means of reducing cultural, race and linguistic disparities. Below is evaluation information from a hospital with a mental health care facility.

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The hospital under assessment recruits promotes and supports a culture that is all inclusive regarding leadership, workforce and governance that responds to the people in that specific area. A social worker in the facility gave information that helped make the following evaluations: Allocates of resources for training and educating the governance, leadership and workforce on promoting a culturally diverse health environment (Diamond et al., 2010). The managerial ensures that cultural competency is applied throughout administrative processes. Recruitment and retaining of strategies ensure diversity at all levels of the services. Provision of communication strategies that promote a diverse community such as, trained interpreters among others.

In this hospital, leadership has both strategic and public relation planning aspects. Strategic plan aspect assesses environmental and need of the communities, and putting forward goals that are cultural competency related. Public relations, the hospital educates the public on cultural competency practices and progress in meeting the CLAS the set goals. Additionally, the hospital ensures a participatory decision making by the community to ensure all grievances presentation. Continuous improvement of CLAS-related activities, measure and policies are done by the hospital through conducting regular assessment of the community health needs. Collection and maintenance of accurate data also facilitate continuous improvement. Collection and demographic information keeping help in monitoring and evaluating the progress of policy adherence (Weech-Maldonado 2012).

Information is generated through a phone call in which the respondent gladly provide the needed information. There were a few distractions as the respondent was occasionally required to attend to clients. There was no report alteration, however. The generated information could not be attested to be true as the assessor was not in the actual environment. From the assessment, the hospital in the discussion seems to follow most of the guidelines on health policies provided by the CLAS. However, there lacks an excellent educative forum on health issues. Very scanty information on how the clients get information on health matters is mentioned. There is need to have educative sessions with the patients on various health topics of their concern to help them prevent, where possible, and enable them to have a healing and recovery process.

An evaluation report is received by the concerned authorities with a positive attitude and promised to take action on improving the few areas that seem not to be put forward CLAS policy guidelines. It is the hospital's responsibility to ensure delivery of culturally competent and relevant services and programs by providing practical, equitable, understandable and respectful quality service while taking into account the different cultural health practices and beliefs, through health literacy, understandable languages, and other important communication.

Reference

Diamond, L. C., Wilson-Stronks, A., & Jacobs, E. A. (2010). Do hospitals measure up to the national culturally and linguistically appropriate services standards?. Medical care, 1080-1087.

Weech-Maldonado, R., Dreachslin, J. L., Brown, J., Pradhan, R., Rubin, K. L., Schiller, C., & Hays, R. D. (2012). Cultural competency assessment tool for hospitals: Evaluating hospitals' adherence to the culturally and linguistically appropriate services standards. Health care management review, 37(1), 54.