INTERVIEW

Interview



Interview

The interview was taken on Thursday October 12, 2009. It was telephonic interview, which was based on a questionnaire that was prepared for this interview. The interviewee was a representative of the Long Island Jewish Medical Center, North Shore (LIJ) Medical Health Systems.

Language barriers can have a significant adverse impact on health and health care including lower health status; lower likelihood of having a usual source of care; lower rates of receipt of preventive health services; increased risk of drug complications;10 and greater resource utilization for diagnostic testing.11 Spanish-speaking patients and Spanish-speaking parents of pediatric patients report lower satisfaction with care, worse communication with their providers, worse access to care, and worse customer service from managed care organizations compared to their English-speaking counterparts.

Long Island Jewish Medical Center has an effective multilingual support system in practice. Every unit in the Long Island Jewish Medical Center provides language access services to patient. The services are free of cost and a part of the Policy of the hospital. including their rights are given on admission, Signs are in clear site, in the lobby as you enter the hospital, in waiting areas, by the elevators, hallways, pamphlets, flyers, it's a part of the admission papers. The hospital provides language access services to all the different languages- You name it Italian, Greek, Russian.

In August of 2000, President Clinton issued executive order 13166 entitled “Improving Access to Services for Persons with Limited English Proficiency.” This requires every federal agency providing financial assistance to non-federal entities to publish guidance on how recipients can provide meaningful access to limited English proficient persons in order to comply with Title VI regulations. The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health issued National Standards on Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health Care (CLAS standards) in December 2000. New York Law requires licensed general acute-care hospitals to adopt and annually review a policy for providing language-assistance services to patients with “language or communication barriers.” Federal law requires hospitals that receive federal financial assistance, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and grant or training funds, to take certain steps to ensure meaningful access for individuals with physical, cultural or linguistic barriers. Patient are given wrist bands, bracelets, stickers in patients charts, saying what language they speak ,whether it's Maderin,Chinese, sign language, hearing or mute. The practice of probing and finding one's way to someone else's “core” develops from cultivated persistence. An interviewer will routinely need to ask sub-questions (the “probe questions” mentioned earlier). At other times a good interviewer asks questions in different ways—re-stating, re-phrasing, and re-casting them, sometimes in different tones of voice. The goal is to get respondents to open up, to convey detailed meaning; this will usually happen by being persistent in questioning. Moreover, in dealing with questions that cause discomfort, some interviewees will attempt to move the conversation in a different direction, or convey to the interviewer that he or she should move on to another question. If the subject being discussed is important, and if an insufficiently detailed account has been supplied, the ...