Cultural competency training can help you and your healthcare team meet the CLAS Standards related to communication and language assistance for patients with limited English proficiency (LEP). Quality Interactions offers training that builds the skills you need to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate services for LEP populations.
The National CLAS Standards are 15 principles established by the DHHS's Office of Minority Health and intended to advance health equity, improve healthcare quality, and help eliminate healthcare disparities by guiding healthcare organizations to meet the needs of diverse patient groups.
CLAS stands for: Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services.
Health equity is the goal of optimum health and healthcare for all people. The concept of equity differs from equality by recognizing that not everyone needs the same healthcare to achieve their highest level of health. Health equity requires tailored communication, treatments, and interventions to meet the distinct needs of individuals or groups.
Health equity is achieved when every person has the opportunity to “attain his or her full health potential” and no one is “disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or other socially determined circumstances."
While there are many large scale, systemic barriers that need to be addressed, the CLAS Standards provide a structure for individuals and healthcare organizations to deliver culturally and linguistically appropriate services. In doing so, the CLAS Standards empower organizations to reduce health disparities by improving access, usage, and quality of care.
Fifteen guiding principles make up the CLAS Standards to improve health equity.
Provide effective, equitable, understandable, and respectful quality care and services that are responsive to diverse cultural health beliefs and practices, preferred languages, health literacy, and other communication needs.
1) Governance, leadership, and workforce - ensuring the organization's people and policies meet the needs of the population they serve.
2) Communication and language assistance - ensuring extensive and effective language assistance.
3) Engagement, continuous improvement, and accountability - ongoing measurement and reporting related to linguistically and culturally appropriate goals.
If an organization meets the 14 Standards in the categories above, it will achieve the Primary Standard. Quality Interactions cultural competency training supports implementation of all the CLAS Standards by:
Four of the CLAS Standards are considered so integral to health equity that all healthcare agencies that receive federal funding must meet them. These are Standards 4, 5, 6, and 7, which deal primarily with providing language services to people with limited English proficiency (LEP).
Quality Interactions helps individuals and healthcare organizations meet the four essential CLAS Standards by providing the foundational knowledge your healthcare team needs to overcome language barriers and deliver excellent care to patients with LEP.
Our LEP course, Ensuring High-Quality Care for Individuals with Limited English Proficiency, is designed to help you ensure that everyone at your organization knows why these CLAS Standards are so important and how you can achieve them.
Educate and train governance, leadership, and workforce in culturally and linguistically appropriate policies and practices on an ongoing basis.
Our LEP course helps you meet the ongoing training needs required by Standard 4 with and engaging and immersive 1-hour course that:
Offer language assistance to individuals who have limited English proficiency and/or other communication needs, at no cost to them, to facilitate timely access to all health care and services.
Our LEP course helps learners understand why it is critical to provide free and accessible professional language services for patients with LEP. Information includes:
Inform all individuals of the availability of language assistance services clearly and in their preferred language, verbally and in writing.
Our LEP course provides a detailed framework for informing patients about language assistance services, including:
Ensure the competence of individuals providing language assistance, recognizing that the use of untrained individuals and/or minors as interpreters should be avoided.
Our LEP course is centered around the essential need to work with professional medical interpreters to provide optimal care for patients with LEP. Taking this course:
The CLAS Standards are designed to improve health equity by increasing access to culturally and linguistically appropriate healthcare services, thereby reducing health disparities. Meeting the CLAS Standards will help you and your organization secure federal funding, deliver better care to individuals with LEP, and improve healthcare outcomes and patient experience.
Our LEP course, Ensuring High-Quality Care for Individuals with Limited English Proficiency, is a critical tool for organizations and individual practitioners that need to meet the four most important CLAS Standards.
Act now to establish a baseline of LEP cultural competency at your organization, ensure compliance with CLAS Standards, and improve outcomes for patients with LEP. Request a demo of our LEP cultural competency course today.