How Culturesmart’s Train-the-Trainer Program Leads to Your Success

Convenience: In-house trainers deliver a custom program that fits your needs
Cost-effective: Your trainers train at your location, without travel expense or time away
Economical: Having on-staff interpreters reduces use of phone services and contractors
Patient satisfaction: Patients seek out enhanced interpreter services and professionalism
Better communication: On-site interpretation enhances cross-cultural understanding of symptoms and cultures
Empowerment: Bilingual staff can assist in more complex interpreting situations after training

How did Culturesmart help Queens Health Network?
When the Queens Health Network (QHN) needed to further develop its capacities for providing care for a large number of non-English speaking and limited-English proficient patients, QHN approached Culturesmart and its partner organization, the Institute for Linguistic and Cultural Skills of the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Foundation. We offered a customized medical interpreter training program that included 16 hours of language training in numerous languages: Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu. The project consisted of four 40-hour training programs, each delivered over six full days and offered at two QHN sites. This training project graduated about 90 candidates that now proudly serve as competent interpreters within QHN. Culturesmart is one of the few organizations that have the linguistic and cultural capacity-building capabilities for training a broad range of skills and offering an extensive language-specific training component in over 20 languages.

For more on the success of the program at Queens Health Network, click here to read an article in the New York Times.

When the Joint Commission wrote its article “Is Your Organization Linguistically Competent?: Providing effective interpreter services,” the Commission expressed support of Culturesmart’s bilingual training model in this article.

About Queens Health Network
Queens Health Network is a unique health care provider, serving the largest and most ethnically diverse community in New York City, with immigrants from over 100 nations speaking 167 languages. QHN is comprised of two major teaching hospitals, 11 free standing medical clinics and six school-based health programs.

www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/hhc/qhn/home.html