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Interventional Cultural and Language Assistance Program: Associations between Cultural and Linguistic Factors and Satisfaction with Cancer Care
Costas-Muniz R*, Amir J, Paris M, Spratt D, Arevalo-Perez J, Fareedy S, González CJ, Gany F, Camacho-Rivera M and Osborne JRDepartment of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, USA
- Corresponding Author:
- Rosario Costas-Muniz
Department of Psychiatry
Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, USA
Tel: 646-888-8062
E-mail: costasmr@mskcc.org
Received Date: February 01, 2017; Accepted Date: February 14, 2017; Published Date: February 20, 2017
Citation: Costas-Muniz R, Amir J, Paris M, Spratt D, Arevalo-Perez J, et al. (2017) Interventional Cultural and Language Assistance Program: Associations between Cultural and Linguistic Factors and Satisfaction with Cancer Care. J Community Med Health Educ 7:503. doi: 10.4172/2161-0711.1000503
Copyright: © 2017 Costas-Muniz R, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Addressing language and cultural nuance is required to improve the quality of care among all patients. The tenth version of the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health Care (CLAS) recommends implementing ongoing assessments to integrate specific actions into measurement and continuous quality improvement activities. To this end, we have created the Interventional Cultural and Language Assistance Program (ICLAP). As part of ICLAP, we conducted a cross-sectional needs assessment survey with 564 consecutive patients receiving outpatient Positron emission tomography- computed tomography (PET/CT) imaging at a comprehensive cancer center in the five most prevalent languages of New York City: English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic. The purpose of this study is to describe the language assistance characteristics and needs of a sample of patients receiving care in the cancer center. We examined the relationship between race, ethnicity, birthplace, communication and language assistance characteristics and the satisfaction with the care received. Our results show that race and ethnicity, birthplace, cultural beliefs, language assistance, and communication characteristics were all factors associated with patients' satisfaction with care, illustrating that there is an unmet need among cancer patients to have cultural and linguistic sensitive services.
