Supportive Health Care for Non-English and Non-Spanish Speaking Patients

Grantee: HealthPoint
Timeframe: July 2015 – June 2018 | Total Amount: $370,000

Year 1: July 2015 – June 2016. Amount: $130,000
Year 2: July 2016 – June 2017. Amount: $140,000
Year 3: July 2017 – June 2018. Amount: $100,000

The Supportive Health Care for Non-English and Non-Spanish Speaking Patients project will focus on services to the diverse client population at HealthPoint’s SeaTac community health center (current data shows 1,259 non-English and non-Spanish patients at this clinic). The patients have high rates of chronic conditions, and they often lack health literacy, don’t understand their health condition, aren’t taking their prescribed medications as directed, and therefore have difficulty engaging with us in their plan of care.

Grant funds will provide a full-time registered nurse to provide consistent and intensive support that helps the target group access preventive and primary care, build self-management skills to help with their chronic health condition, and become educated and empowered to take charge of their own health. The project nurse will use in-house interpreters, language lines for phone consultations, and a mobile interpretation cart for secure and HIPAA-compliant video interpretation services via the internet in a variety of languages.

The project nurse will be available to all primary care teams in the clinic with patients in the target population and will operate in a supportive role within the teams. Services will be offered as part of the patient’s primary care visit, as separate nurse visits, as telephone consultation visits, and as group visits and focus groups.

The project nurse will adapt best practices in care delivery to respect and accommodate each patient’s cultural preferences, thereby producing stronger patient relationships to promote better health outcomes. The nurse will focus on educating the patient about their disease, teaching them how to access screenings and preventive care, and building on their strengths and self-efficacy to self-manage their chronic disease. The nurse will work with patients and providers on reciprocal understanding of cross-cultural models of health and illness, which will help mitigate misunderstandings when the differing models of health care do not inherently align. The nurse will use a whole-person approach that addresses unmet needs in other domains of life that affect their ability to engage in their plan of care.