It’s simply a matter of Quality Health Care and Patient Safety!

Qualified health care interpreters provide the critical linkage between clinicians and patients that largely influences care access, quality of care, and patient safety when the principals do not share a common language and/or culture.

Kaiser Permanente has long recognized the critical facilitative role of the linguistically and culturally competent interpreter in the clinical interface between the clinician and limited-English proficient patient. The qualified health care interpreter bridges the cultural and linguistic divide to foster understanding, comfort and trust that ultimately results in higher levels of treatment adherence leading to improved health outcomes.

Accordingly, Kaiser Permanente has embarked on a national initiative, “Building Qualified Health Care Interpreter Capacity in the Community.” This initiative will address the dearth of trained and qualified health care interpreters nationally who are capable of facilitating communication between people whose language, culture and customs are unfamiliar to those from western, biomedical cultures thereby advancing the delivery of culturally competent care. The Health Care Interpreter (HCI) Certificate Program is a major component of this initiative.

Led by National Linguistic & Cultural Programs (NLCP) of Kaiser Permanente, the HCI Certificate Program is now entering its eighth year of partnership with educational institutions across the nation, providing a college-level program to train health care interpreters. The main objective of this program is to give members ready access to culturally competent care in diverse communities by increasing the community's own capacity to provide high-quality health care interpretation.

NLCP is proud to lead organizational efforts to develop innovative and responsive initiatives, programs and training resources that enhance the skills and performance of our work force and communities to better meet the care needs of rapidly growing multilingual and multicultural populations throughout the nation.