Despite living in one of America’s wealthiest communities, many Northern Virginia residents can’t easily access available health care.  Why?  Because they don’t speak English.  The booming labor market in nearby Washington, D.C., attracts so many foreign-born workers that children in Fairfax County public schools speak more than 130 languages at home.  Especially large numbers of Hispanics and Asians have moved into the area in recent years.

The HRSA-supported Northern Virginia Area Health Education Center in Annandale, Va., decided to tackle the language problem by sponsoring a training program for medical interpreters.  In 2001, the AHEC trained 110 medical interpreters who offer translation services in 20 languages.  Once training is completed, the AHEC arranges with local hospitals and clinics to place interpreters on site to help smooth physician interactions with non-English-speaking patients.  The interpreters improved more than 20,000 patient-provider encounters last year.  For lesser-used languages, the AHEC contracts with commercial services such as Language Line, which can provide interpretive services in any language by phone.

“The AHEC interpreters are used in several of our hospitals, and we see firsthand the effect of their training,” says Elita Christiansen, assistant vice president for community health and cultural competency for Inova Health Systems of Northern Virginia.  “Particularly in the most sensitive and complicated cases, like in the Neonatal and Pediatric Intensive Care Units, the interpreters bring not just competent language skills but the ability to improve the encounter with the culturally appropriate approach.  That increases the patient's trust and adds another layer of increased communication.”

That “culturally appropriate approach” also is emphasized by the AHEC, which has launched partnerships between local health care agencies and immigrant-related organizations to improve providers’ awareness of cultural differences.  Some 500 staff from local health care agencies and private practices participated in AHEC-sponsored cultural competency training last year.  There they learned about the behaviors, attitudes, skills and policies that organizations and their staffs need to develop to work effectively with people from different cultures.

Christina Stevens, program director for the Community Health Care Network of the Fairfax County Health Department, calls the NV AHEC “invaluable -- not only in helping raise awareness about the need to have linguistically and culturally appropriate services, but in providing the road map on how to continue to strive for the needed level of competency.”

NV AHEC is one of eight regional centers supported by a HRSA grant to Virginia Commonwealth University.  Its mission -- like that of all 170 AHECs across the country -- is to promote health careers and access to primary health care for medically underserved individuals by building community-academic partnerships.  (HRSA Acting Administrator Betty Duke visited the NV AHEC last month.)

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