Cultural competency is more than just a matter of language fluency, it’s a powerful and integral component in creating expert mental health care, and it’s a priority at QLER. We have carefully developed a team of providers ensuring our services are respectful of and tailored to the diverse cultural backgrounds of patients when relevant and desirable.
Our approach at QLER to honing our ability to provide culturally sensitive care, while in a virtual environment, is constantly evolving. Here are some of the ways we are leveling up.
- Communication Barriers: In our world in which managing mental health emergencies equals normalcy, QLER’s translation services are helping us make it happen. Given our care delivery is so dependent on verbal communication, it can be challenging for patients with limited English proficiency or different communication styles. QLER is working to provide multilingual providers and to bridge the gap in fostering a space where language will not hold us back from providing quality care, in the very moment it’s needed.
- Cultural Misunderstandings: Providers may not be familiar with cultural expressions of distress, idioms of mental health, or the social and cultural factors affecting a patient’s mental health- not at QLER. Our intensive implementation and optimization work with each of our hospital partner relationships, prepares us ahead of time for the cultures that will typically be encountered in that ER and the best practices they have already developed. Even after absorbing those, we make sure to build a dedicated team of providers from different backgrounds and cultures hopefully giving our physician team the opportunity to provide culturally competent care in the ER.
- Trust Building: Establishing a necessary trust and rapport can be challenging in emergent telepsychiatry. As QLER physicians navigate an environment in which patients may be wary of digital platforms or have experienced systemic discrimination in healthcare settings, broad experience distilled into best practices across a large, national, and dedicated group providing emergency telepsychiatry is key. Cultural differences can further complicate the process of mental health care delivery. Working with a telepsychiatry group that is focused, large, and diverse enough to offer this culturally competent care is best practice.
QLER Telepsychiatry is a large psychiatry group focused on leading telepsychiatry in America’s emergency departments. Our growth over seven years gives QLER the horsepower and economy of scale to tailor telepsychiatry partnerships for hospitals that can bridge the gaps in cultural competency as well as address other population specific nuances in American emergency departments.
