CLAS Standards for Health Care Organizations
CLAS Standards (Culturally Linguistic Appropriate Services) are 14 standards developed by the Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health in 2002. These Federal standards are composed of Mandates, Guidelines and Recommendations, and were designed to reduce disparity issues in the provision of health care in the United States of America. All health care institutions in the country responsible to address these standards.
These standards affect Health Care Organizations, patients/consumers as well as staff, employees and sub-contractors. Health Care Organizations are described as any public or private institution involved in ANY aspect of delivering health care services. Patients/consumers are defined as individuals, including accompanying family members, guardians, or companions seeking physical or mental health care services, or other health related services. Staff refers to individuals employed directly by a health care organization, as well as those sub-contracted or affiliated with the organization.
The standards address three critical areas:
- Culturally Competent Care (1-3)
- Language Access Services (4-7)
- Organizational Support for Cultural Competence (8-14)
The standards are:
- Health Care organizations should ensure that patients/consumers receive from all staff members effective, understandable, and respectful care that is provided in a manner compatible with their cultural health beliefs and practices and preferred language.
- Health care organizations should implement strategies to recruit, retain and promote at all levels of the organization a diverse staff and leadership that are representative of the demographic characteristics of the service area.
- Health care organizations should ensure that staff at all levels and across all disciplines receive ongoing education and training in culturally and linguistically appropriate service delivery.
- Health care organizations must offer and provide language assistance services, including bilingual staff and interpreter services, at no cost to each patient/consumer with limited English proficiency at all points of contact, in a timely manner during all hours of operation.
- Health care organizations must provide to patient/consumers in their preferred language both verbatim offers and written notices informing them of their right to receive language assistance services.
- Health care organizations must assure the competence of language assistance provided to limited English proficient patients/consumers by interpreters and bilingual staff. Family and friends should not be used to provide interpretations services (except on request by the patient/consumer).
- Health care organizations must make available easily understood patient-related materials and post signage in the language of the commonly encountered groups and/or groups represented in the service area.
- Health care organizations should develop, implement and promote a written strategic plan that outlines clear goals, policies, operational plans and management accountability/oversight mechanisms to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate services.
- Health care organizations should conduct initial and ongoing organizations self-assessments or CLAS-related activities and are encouraged to integrate cultural and linguistic competence-related measures into their internal audits, performance improvement programs, patient satisfaction assessments and outcomes-based evaluations.
- Health care organizations should ensure that data on the individual patient’s/consumer’s race, ethnicity and spoken and written language are collected in health records, integrated into the organization’s management information systems and periodically updated.
- Health care organizations should maintain a current demographic, cultural and epidemiological profile of the community as well as a needs assessment to accurately plan for and implement services that respond to the cultural and linguistic characteristics of the service area.
- Health care organizations should develop participatory, collaborative partnerships with communities and utilize a variety of formal and informal mechanisms to facilitate community and patient/consumer involvement in designing and implementing CLAS-related activities.
- Health care organizations should ensure that conflict and grievance resolution processes are culturally and linguistically sensitive and capable of identifying, preventing and resolving cross-cultural conflicts or complaints by patients/consumers.
- Health care organizations are encouraged to regularly make available to the public information about their progress and successful innovations in implementing the CLAS standards and to provide public notice in their communities about the availability of this information.
