5 National Quality Measures for Language Services in Healthcare

Presenter: Dr. Izabel Souza, M.Ed., CMI-Spanish, PhD.
Dr. Souza works as a certified interpreter (conference, legal, medical, community) and interpreter educator in several universities. She served as President of IMIA and was responsible for launching the first national accredited medical interpreter certification program in the United States. She also served as Secretary General for the International Federation of Translators, and continues her work as ISO liaison to the FIT Standards Committee and as an ISO and ASTM Standards Expert in interpreting and translation standards.
This workshop showcases the work of ten hospitals across the country, who worked together for over a year as the National Languages Services Network funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to improve language services in hospitals. One of these hospital systems was Cambridge Health Alliance, and Dr. Souza will share from her experience of being a part of this national project.
The work used standardized performance improvement measures and a quality improvement framework. This network developed strategies to improve the accessibility of their language services, and tested them using five quality standards. Hospital representatives met monthly to discuss, troubleshoot, and support each other in this endeavor.
National program staff from RWJF and participating hospitals developed multiple tools and resources, including a toolkit, journal articles and reports, videos, and a website. This workshop is for interpreters, and is particularly useful for interpreter coordinators, managers, and directors working in hospitals.
Learning objectives:
1. Participants will be able to identify the five national quality measures for language services in hospitals (interpreting and translation).
2. Participants will learn about the benefits and difficulties of developing, implementing, and monitoring such quality measures.
3. Participants will learn about other related quality measures they can promote and/or apply to their organization.
CEUs: 1 ATA, 1 CCHI and 0.1 RID CEU point.*
*If you do not see your state or organization’s CEUs here, contact us via Services@linguisteducationonline.com. In most cases we can submit the webinar for CEUs on demand.
**Our office hours are Mon-Fri from 9 AM to 5 PM, and access to webinars is given manually. We try to accommodate all after hours requests, but if you purchase the webinar over the weekend, you might need to wait till Monday to get access.