The Cultural Competence and Linguistic Competence Policy Assessment (CLCPA) was designed for the purpose of supporting community health centers and evaluating their preparedness for dealing with culturally, demographically and linguistically diverse communities (CLCPA, n.d.). This test shows the levels of awareness the agency in question has of other cultures and languages in the area, and how well they are equipped to provide them with high-quality service.
Using this assessment, I have evaluated the mentioned above aspects of my local community health center.
My local health care center is located in an area with a large Latino and African-American population and thus has accepted values, principles and approaches that allow them to work most efficiently cross-culturally. In the similar vein, they show an appreciation of diversity, as well as the ability to adjust to diversity and cultural contexts of individual patients, or their families and communities. However, this is achieved through an informal policy rather than a formal one, due to a large percentage of demographically diverse employees, and through the agency’s current hiring practices.
A similar situation is seen with linguistic competence, which is mostly based on a multilingual and a multicultural staff, who can approach cross-cultural communication comfortably. The center has a foreign language interpretation service, and also provides a lot of its print reading materials in clear, concise form, supported with symbols and iconographic for people with low literacy skills.
Unfortunately, the center is more restrictive in terms of other areas of linguistic competence and has only begun introducing sign language interpretation services.
However, in the recent years, the center has received a lot of government support to establish better cultural, social, and linguistic integration policies, which will allow the center to improve its ability to tackle patients of different demographics, cultures, languages, and needs. Already there is an improvement, and formal policies are beginning to replace the informal ones.
References
Community Health Centers. (n.d.). Web.
Cultural and Linguistic Competence Policy Assessment (CLCPA). (n.d.). Web.