Message understood: Communicating with hospital employees

Patients haven’t been the only beneficiaries of the UW Hospital and Clinics’ efforts to accommodate shifts in Madison’s cultural make-up.

Related story: Hospital bridges language gap

About a year ago, Tom Peck, the director of UW Hospital environmental services, conducted a survey revealing that about 20 percent of his staff was composed of non-English natives-from Hispanics and Chinese to Hmong and Tibetans. Peck also noticed that few of his non-native employees had the English skills to pass the standardized test given to all prospective employees in the department.

“In today’s challenging work environment, we realized we need to ensure we’re giving the employees the tools necessary to do their jobs,” says Peck, whose employees handle housekeeping tasks for the main hospital building and several outlying clinics. “And given the changing population, one of these tools is the ability to speak English.”

A steering committee of representatives from local unions, the instructional staff at Madison Area Technical College and several hospital departments studied the problem. UW Hospital contracted last spring with MATC to begin offering English-as-a-second-language (ESL) courses to first- and second-shift employees–at the hospital’s expense. The response has been impressive. So far, 25 employees have signed up for the beginner course.

“It’s quite an investment of time and money on our part,” says Peck. “But we feel it’s going to pay off in the long run.”

This fall, efforts in Environmental Services have also focused on improving the other side of the language equation: In addition to another round of beginner ESL classes, supervisors also have the opportunity to take Spanish classes at MATC to better communicate with their employees. An advanced ESL class (on the employee’s time) completes the mix.

Finally, patient-education materials are getting a closer look and some adjustment to serve a diverse patient base. The hospital offers a Spanish-language video that introduces patients to the hospital experience and a library of health materials in Spanish. Peck, meanwhile, has hired a translator to convert employee manuals and handbooks into Spanish.

Such efforts have garnered the UW Hospital a national reputation as a facility that has taken the lead in developing multicultural services. Bidar-Sielaff recently returned from a meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Interpreter Association, where the hospital was recognized as having one of the best interpreter services programs in the country.

“For the size of our city, we do an excellent job,” she notes. “There are much larger cities that haven’t even come close to dealing with this issue.”