Our four signage pilot sites were announced in February of 2005:
Saint Francis Medical Center
Grady Health System
Cambridge Health Alliance
Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Medical Center
These final four facilities were selected because they offer:
- A balance of geographic locations from around the country;
- A balance of large and small, urban and rural community types
representing a variety of regions in the country;
- A balance of multi-floor facilities, single floor facilities
and healthcare campus facilities;
- A satisfactory number of destinations for testing;
- A valid existing sign program for use as a counterpoint
to the symbol signs being tested;
- Diverse patient populations.
As part of the Hablamos Juntos project we will be producing a white paper reporting what we learned from the pilot sites, offering recommendations for wayfinding approaches using symbols in a variety of different health facilities. In April, the symbols being tested in the pilot sites will be posted on our website. We hope that you will become an early adopter of these wayfinding symbols.
Located in Grand Island, Nebraska, Saint Francis Medical Center is a Catholic Health Initiatives hospital and a partner of one of the ten Hablamos Juntos grantee sites, the Central Nebraska Area Health Education Center. Saint Francis’ acute care and outpatient diagnostics building is a 413,800 square- foot, single-floor structure. The medical center—in conjunction with the system’s three primary care clinics, a psychiatric clinic and a student clinic—serves approximately 187,000 patients annually. The majority of these patients are from the rural areas surrounding Grand Island.
The languages spoken by the medical center’s patients are Spanish (Grand Island has a large and growing population from Central and South America) by majority, and very small numbers of individuals speak Nuer, Vietnamese, and Laotian. The hospital is currently unable to provide consistent interpreting services for their Nuer-, Vitenamese-, and Laotian-speaking patients. Individuals and families in need of interpretation services for Nuer, Vietnamese and Laotian are served by the Language Line. Due to the very small population, there are few certified interpreters in these languages.
Grady Health System (GHS), located in Atlanta, GA, includes Grady Memorial Hospital, Hughes Spalding Children’s Hospital, Crestview Health and Rehabilitation Center, 10 neighborhood health centers (including one located at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport), the Infectious Disease Program and the only level one trauma center within a 100-mile radius. Grady is one of the largest public hospitals in the United States and covers 1,800,000 square feet in the main hospital. The state’s only Poison Center is housed at Grady, and Grady's Emergency Medical Service (EMS) is the ambulance provider for the city of Atlanta.
Since 2000, Atlanta has the fastest growing immigrant population in the nation, and Georgia experienced a 360 percent increase in its immigrant population in the 1990s. In 2004, Grady Health System served patients who spoke 66 different languages. The top five non-English languages currently at GHS are: Spanish, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Amharic and French. Over 90 percent of the Limited English Proficiency (LEP) patients coming to GHS speak Spanish.
The Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) is an academic public health care system in the Boston metropolitan area that includes three community teaching hospitals and over 25 primary care sites. The CHA is proportionately the largest provider of health care to under-insured populations in Massachusetts, and approximately 45% of their patients utilize their existing interpreter services.
The HJ symbol-based signage system will be pilot-tested at Somerville Hospital, a 193,000 square-foot multi-floor facility located in Somerville, a mid-sized suburb of Boston. The top four languages spoken by patients at Somerville are Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian-Creole, and Hindi.
Kaiser Permanente is the nation’s largest non-profit health care organization, serving members in nine states and the District of Columbia. Over 130 different languages are represented among its diverse 8.2 million members and 140,000-person work force. To serve this diverse membership, Kaiser Permanente works to elevate the state of health care with progressive products, services, and advancements aimed especially at eliminating health care disparities.
Kaiser Permanente’s San Francisco Medical Center is a multi-floor, 237-bed facility that measures 366,194 square feet. The Medical Center offers a wide range of care, and serves approximately 178,000 health plan members from San Francisco City and County. The top four languages spoken by the facility’s members are Cantonese, Spanish, Mandarin, and Vietnamese.
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