HIGH POINT – High Point Regional Health System opened the door to non-English-speaking patients a long time ago, but now the hospital is rolling out the welcome mat.

The health system’s new cultural ambassador program, implemented last month, aims to eliminate barriers between hospital staff and patients who speak another language.

“We’ve had the language translation and interpreter services for many years,” explains Janice Wakefield, “but we wanted to take things a step further to enhance the communication even more between non-English patients and our health-care team, to work on being more welcoming.”

Wakefield, a clinical chaplain in the hospital’s department of spiritual care, ethics and diversity – which oversees the cultural ambassador program – says the program will benefit not only non-English-speaking patients, but also hospital staff.

“This program will help our non-English patients understand better how to navigate the health-care system and empower them by putting communication tools in their hands,” she says. “But it will also help our staff have a chance to get to know folks from other cultures and increase their skills in providing care to patients.”

The cultural ambassador program serves a growing population of patients – both inpatients and in the emergency department – at High Point Regional. Between Oct. 1, 2008 and Oct. 1, 2009, the hospital admitted 372 non-English-speaking patients and saw another 1,212 in the emergency department, according to statistics provided by health system officials. The vast majority of those patients spoke Spanish, but they also included patients who spoke Vietnamese, Russian, Swahili and several other languages.

For Spanish-speaking patients, the hospital has an on-site interpreter weekdays, who has also translated a number of hospital documents into Spanish. For days when the interpreter is not available, and for patients who speak other languages, the hospital contracts with an interpreting service available by telephone.

The cultural ambassador program goes beyond mere interpreting service, though. Each Spanish-speaking patient will be visited by a “cultural ambassador” – a hospital staff member – who will give the patient language materials including:

• A welcome packet with information on interpretation services, suggestions for talking with doctors, and information about visiting hours and parking;

• Spanish menus and instructions on how to order food;

• Bilingual signs and picture cards to help with routine communication.

The ambassador will also set up a speaker phone in the patient’s room for easy access to the telephone interpretation services, as well as place a language alert form on the patient’s chart and a sign in the patient’s room so staff will know what language the patient speaks.

“The cultural ambassador program is really an expansion of what we’ve been doing,” Wakefield says. “It’s a pilot program right now, focusing on Spanish patients, but we hope to expand that to other languages, too.”