Building Cultural and Linguistic Competence ■ 13
Centered Care: A Roadmap for Hospitals. The monograph provides checklists to improve effective communication during the admission, assessment, treatment, end-of-life, and discharge and transfer stages of a given patient’s hospitalization trajectory. They strongly state that:
Every patient that enters the hospital has a unique set of needs—clinical symptoms that require medical attention and issues specific to the individ- ual that can affect his or her care. (The Joint Commission, 2010, p. 1)
They implicitly recognize that when a given person moves through the hospital- ization continuum, he or she not only requires medical and nursing intervention, but they also require care that addresses the spectrum of each person’s demo- graphic and personal characteristics. The Joint Commission has made many ef- forts to understand personal needs and then provide guidance to organizations to address those needs. They initially focused on studying language, culture, and health literacy needs and presently (as of 2011), they are focusing on effective communication, cultural competence, and patient- and family-centered care.