Language liaisons
Language planning leadership in health care
Brett Lee | Children’s Medical Center of Dallas
Dallas and the North Texas region of the United States have seen profound demographic shifts that have challenged one regional health care network in its effort to provide quality health services to an increasingly linguistically heterogeneous community. The response to this challenge has included a reconceptualization of the organization’s language policy to create alignment between it and the organization’s mission, considering language policy from both an equity and a quality control perspective. This industry-facing language planning case study looks at how Children’s Medical Center of Dallas has responded to the challenge by explicitly recognizing patients’ linguistic needs, developing its workforce, and creating a language liaison program that bridges the communication gap between doctors and their patients. While governments select language policies and engage in language planning mainly for political purposes, private organizations serving multilingual communications have quality of service as an added incentive to engage in such activities if they are to remain viable.
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Squires, Allison, Sarah Miner, Eva Liang, Maichou Lor, Chenjuan Ma & Amy Witkoski Stimpfel
2019.
How language barriers influence provider workload for home health care professionals: A secondary analysis of interview data.
International Journal of Nursing Studies 99
► pp. 103394 ff.
Fettes, Mark
2023.
Language and the Sustainable Development Goals: Challenges to Language Policy and Planning. In
Language and Sustainable Development [
Language Policy, 32],
► pp. 11 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.