Dealing with Diverse Patients: All in a Day’s Work

“Establishing positive relations with patients and their family members is critical to a patient’s recovery, and it’s just one of the many ways we go about valuing a patient’s cultural perspective,” says Warren Whitehead, assistant vice president, International Services, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital. “Five full-time international patient representatives-as well as more than 15 bilingual Auxilians-stand ready to help domestic and international patients with language or other cultural diversity issues.”

One such cultural issue is currently being handled by international patient representative Maria Duran. Assigned to work with a patient from Latin America who spent several months in the ICU for a heart condition, Duran arranged for St. Luke’s dietitians to help the patient’s wife learn how to adapt their native diet to make it more heart healthy. Once he is released to recover in a Houston-area apartment – which Duran also helped locate – it will be critical for the patient to consume less sodium.

“Just because patients are not living at home doesn’t mean they don’t want to eat the dishes they’ve grown accustomed to eating their entire lives,” says Duran. “Whether it’s coordinating nutritional consults, providing their hometown newspaper or keeping in contact with the patient’s family physician in another country, the International Center staff works together to serve a patient’s cultural and healthcare needs.”

Patient service representatives are on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to prepare for any language or cultural issues that may arise during a patient’s stay.

“We tailor their care so that interpretation services are made available in Arabic, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. If our patients speak another language, we also have access to resources that provide interpretation in more than 30 languages if needed,” Whitehead says.

“What makes our patient services unique is that our employees are able to bring their personal experiences, upbringing, and educational and business training from such countries as Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and Ecuador, just to name a few,” continues Whitehead.

“By working with the other multi-lingual employees at St. Luke’s, we’re sensitive to the culturally significant requests that our patients (and their family members) require to improve their health and well being,” he says.

“Worrying about a loved one’s recovery is stressful. Combine that with an inability to speak the language and the difficulty of navigating a large, unfamiliar hospital in a foreign country, and it’s easy to understand why international patients sometimes need special assistance,” says Rosa Frimm, international center clinical manager. “Fortunately, at St. Luke’s we’re blessed with a number of talented employees who go above and beyond the call of duty to make patients and their family members feel at home.”

Planning ahead and knowing patients’ cultural needs and requirements is key. Then the International Center can prepare to meet those needs.

Frimm remembers a situation with a Greek patient’s family in which she saw the close connection between the patient’s wife and Lydia Negassa, a registered nurse in the intensive care unit.

“From where I was working at the nurse’s station I could see Lydia carrying on an animated conversation inside the patient’s room,” recalls Frimm. “I later found out that Lydia didn’t know Greek at all – but that didn’t seem to stop her from communicating. It was an amazing sight to see the two of them laughing.”

Negassa was that patient’s nurse for a long period of time, and in the course, picked up a few Greek words. She always had a translator handy, but instead, chose to independently figure out a way to communicate.

“The patient had some coronary complications, which caused his hospitalization to be longer than his wife had anticipated, so her anxiety level was high. As a result, she was very agitated and needed to vent her worries. It was up to me to calm her down and listen,” Negassa says.

“Through body language and the photos she showed me, I heard about her children, her house and much of her life story,” she continues. “She shared so much with me that when I came to work, she would give me a big hug and kiss because she was so happy to see me. When you have nothing but a few words written down, you join words together and don’t worry about using the proper tense. We established such a good rapport that I’ll never forget her.”

---

©2006 Texas Medical Center

---

E-Mail: tmcinfo@texmedctr.tmc.edu
URL: http://www.tmc.edu/tmcnews/03_01_03/page_01.html