Tip of the Week
Hmong Health Professionals Host Masked Ball
The Hmong Health Care Professionals Coalition will host its second annual masquerade fundraiser, Friday, November 2, 6 pm – 11:55 pm, at Buasavanh Restaurant Banquet Hall, 7324 Lakeland Ave. N. in Brooklyn Park.
This is a semi-formal masked ball. Don’t have a mask? Organizers will be selling them at the door. Tickets are $20, or $200 for a table. Music will be provided by the band, KoomSiab. A recommendation from event organizers: Bring your dancing shoes.
The Hmong Health Care Professionals Coalition is a partnership that is invested in “improving the health and well- being of the Hmong and surrounding communities by providing health education, advocacy, and support in health research.”
Get tickets by emailing hmonghcpc@gmail.com with a message that includes your name, phone number, email, and number of tickets you’ll purchase. Or call Amy Yang, (763) 318-9758. Get more information from Zong Xiong (651) 260-0888 or Maytinee Xiong (612) 790-8511.
How To: Adding Diversity to Provider Staff
One frequently cited observation in the world of cross-cultural care is that patients feel more comfortable dealing with providers who look like them.
How to get there? Here’s an example from the Minneapolis StarTribune. The article, Ladder program helps youngsters step up to health care careers, describes a north Minneapolis-based mentorship and training program aimed at turning more people of color into doctors, nurses and dentists.
The Ladder program took off six years ago, when Dr. Renee Chrichlow of the University of Minnesota’s Broadway Family Medicine Clinic, founded the non-profit organization. Kids can start in the program at age nine, but they can hang on to mentorship opportunities throughout high school, college, and medical or nursing school.
Many Faces of Community Health Conference: Register Now!
The annual Many Faces of Community Health conference is set for Thursday-Friday, October 25 and 26, at the Hyatt Regency Bloomington, at 3200 E 81st St, in Bloomington, with registration open now.
Conference sessions are aimed at improving care and reducing health disparities in underserved populations and among those living in poverty. With a focus on safety net providers, conference presenters will explore community care innovations, health care delivery models, and reform initiatives that promote health equity, prevent and manage chronic diseases, and ensure access for all.
One More Tough Choice for Immigrants
Immigrants’ lives will become that much harder as the Trump administration imposes new rules on those who legally use public benefits such as food stamps, Part D Medicare drug coverage, or Section 8 housing vouchers. They could be denied green cards that allow them to live and work in the United States as the government aims at barring people it views as an economic drain.
The rule change could affect about 382,000 people a year, and is part of what the New York Times calls “the latest in a series of aggressive crackdowns by President Trump and his hard-line aides on legal and illegal immigration.”
Find a detailed examination of the issue in this Times piece, “U.S. to Place Stricter Limits on Immigrants.”
ACA Language Access Change Gives Patients More Leverage
Here’s a interpreting/translation-related lawsuit that could have a major impact on your organization. The case started in 2015 when Houston resident Song Xie was sent home from the hospital with discharge instructions in English that his caretaker son couldn’t read. Song Xie later suffered a stroke. His family now wants to hold the hospital liable.
The resulting lawsuit alleges that the hospital violated a clause of the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition on national origin discrimination by failing to translate discharge instructions into a language the son could understand.
A detailed story from Bloomberg News — Hospitals: Patients Who Don’t Speak English Have Rights Too — explains that the ACA’s Section 1557 allows patients to sue providers when language barriers aren’t effectively addressed. Fines and damage awards, warns Bloomberg, could add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars under this new twist on the law.
So You Only Speak English?
Let’s take a break this week from wondering how to help English language learners, and stop to think why most people in Minnesota only speak English. For some fresh perspective on how weak this is in comparison to the other end of the scale — that of the world’s premier polyglots — take a look at this recent story in the New Yorker magazine: The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages: What can hyperpolyglots teach the rest of us?
Among the hyperpolyglots who appear in the piece is Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia. Author Judith Thurman observes that Rojas-Berscia has “command of twenty-two living languages (Spanish, Italian, Piedmontese, English, Mandarin, French, Esperanto, Portuguese, Romanian, Quechua, Shawi, Aymara, German, Dutch, Catalan, Russian, Hakka Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Guarani, Farsi, and Serbian), thirteen of which he speaks fluently. He also knows six classical or endangered languages: Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Shiwilu, Muniche, and Selk’nam, an indigenous tongue of Tierra del Fuego, which was the subject of his master’s thesis.”
How does he do it? What can you learn from him and others with amazing language abilities? You’ll have to read the story to find out. Check it out here.
English: Why It’s So Tough to Learn
In case you doubted that it’s a hard language to master, here’s a video that demonstrates the quagmire through which English learners must wade. In this short film, Aaron Alon shows what happens when you apply consistent vowel-sound rules to English. The result is something that sounds like a version of Old English — sort of familiar, but often difficult to decode. Run through the video once and you’ll gain a new appreciation of the tough work that English learners take on.
DHS Autism Videos Reach Out to Diverse Audience
“On the Autism Spectrum: Families Find Help and Hope,” is a series of five short films produced by the Minnesota Department of Human Services that raise awareness and understanding of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and services available to Minnesota families. The videos are aimed at specific communities, including:
The films provide support for families experiencing ASD within communities that have historically underutilized available resources. Each 15-20 minute film features interviews with parents, advocates, medical professionals, educators, and community leaders speaking in the language of the target community, with subtitles in English.
Thinking in Two Languages
Here’s a thought-provoking article from Psychology Today that explores how language can affect memory and behavior. Author Viorica Marian, Ph.D., psycholinguist at Northwestern University, describes how memories of multilingual people are linked to the language used while the event occurred. “Memories,” she observes, “will often be more emotional when there is a match between the language spoken when the experience took place and the language spoken when remembering it.”
Among the results:
- multilingual speakers may experience more stress when taboo words are spoken in their native language;
- but they may be less biased and more consistent in their non-native language;
- and their assessment of risk may be altered depending on the power and variety of examples that come to mind — which, again, may depend on the language spoken when previous examples presented themselves.
Where’s the significance for health care providers? This is how Marian sees it: “How risky something feels affects the choices that we make for everything from medical decisions to national security. For example, in the United States, over 25% of doctors are foreign-born and many of their patients speak another language as well. It is important to be aware of how the language being spoken may be influencing the decisions we and others around us make.”
Accurate Interpretation: Could It Have Changed History?
What if it was widely understood that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had said, “We will outlast you,” instead of “We will bury you,” in 1956 at the height of the Cold War?
What if, days before the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japanese prime minister Kantaro Suzuki had been correctly understood to tell a US emissary, “No comment. We need more time,” instead of being thought to convey an attitude of “silent contempt”?
The perils of sketchy translation and interpretation are explored in a New York Times opinion piece, “Why Mistranslation Matters” by Mark Polizzotti. Pilizzotti, author of the recent book, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, lays out a series of translation- and interpretation-inspired misconceptions, starting with the so-called apple tree in the Garden of Eden.