During a pandemic, patients need quality healthcare, which involves the provision of timely and accurate communication with doctors and medical insurance providers. More importantly, caring for Limited English Proficient (LEP) people can be complex due to language barriers. Therefore, in order to improve patient outcomes especially in this case, it is essential to provide the healthcare content and pertinent medical documents in the languages that the patients speak. As such, making your medical and healthcare documents multilingual is a requirement you must meet nowadays. Here are four fundamental types of healthcare content you should translate during a pandemic.
Critical Medical Documents
Translation of medical documents can become an obstacle in the organization’s flow involving extra costs. In order to be eligible for federal financial assistance, you need to make critical medical documents available in the most common languages spoken by the patients. Additionally, you need to translate your medical documents for compliance with federal regulations. Critical medical data that require certified document translation services includes complaint forms, discharge instructions, intake forms, informed consent documents, notices of eligibility criteria for services, and notices of free language assistance.
Emergency Notifications
It is especially important during a pandemic to inform all people that visit your healthcare facility of current health-related protocols. Such information includes lifesaving emergency information on the ongoing pandemic, hand washing and sanitizing diagrams, rules for visitors. It is vital to have these emergency notifications in all relevant languages in areas where there is high traffic such as entrance points, waiting areas. In the case there are digital monitors and displays throughout your facility, you can make the information available in different languages with the help of subtitles. Having your emergency information available in various languages will ensure that all your patients, even foreigners, can access critical information during the pandemic.
Digital Multilingual Emergency Communications
Communicating on social media, your website, text messages, and emails are the best methods to quickly dispatch pertinent information for communities and patients you serve during the pandemic. As a healthcare provider, you need to spread emergency information covering various important issues regarding the Covid-19 virus in order to mitigate risks. To be effective, you need to make these communications available in multiple languages.
Printed Multilingual Emergency Communications
A big part of the community you serve, for example, senior citizens and people with disabilities, can’t use online technologies such as social media and email. Therefore, direct mail with printed documents is a way to communicate with this segment of the population. After preparing your documents in plain language, it is important to order certified document translation services to localize them for you. This will guarantee that your papers are high-quality, accurate and culturally appropriate so it makes sense to your target language speakers.
Partnering with Homeland Language Services ensures that your medical and healthcare content reaches the highest quality of translation. This will provide assurance to you that all the time, especially during Covid-19 pandemic, that you are communicating the right information to the right people at the right time.