Our Diverse Community

New York Hospital Queens enjoys a proud legacy of providing health care excellence for several generations of Queens residents and our increasingly diverse and growing community.
 
Queens is home to the most culturally diverse population in the United States. New York Hospital Queens has worked hard to build services that are sensitive to the customs, traditions and needs of this diverse community. To minimize barriers to communications and understanding, the hospital has multi-lingual physicians, nurses and other staff who speak Chinese, Mandarin, Korean, Greek, Russian, Spanish and other languages used by many of our patients. We offer real-time language translation services that enable us to communicate in more than 100 languages and dialects. We also make considerable use of the Language Line® phone lines as well as our new mobile video interpretation technology that brings qualified interpreters “into the room” with the patient and doctor.
 
Our efforts to create a culturally sensitive environment extend to staff training; we have a language assistance coordinator to help ensure that all patients with limited skills in English can receive care in a language they understand. We also regularly train staff members in medical interpreting, to make sure key medical information is conveyed to all of our patients. All of our hospital’s language coordinators participate on a committee designed to help them do their jobs even better. 

Celebrating Diversity, a program of the Graduate Medical Education Department, educates residents around cultural competency and communication skills. Cultural Competence is the ability of healthcare professionals to communicate with and effectively provide high-quality care to patients from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds. Aspects of diversity include - but go beyond - race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, risk factors, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and country of origin. We strive to create an institutional culture that supports education in cultural awareness and communication skills, and to celebrate the diversity that surrounds us.

Beyond language, we offer menus featuring foods popular with Asian, Italian, and Hispanic patients,  and patients who maintain a Kosher diet– it is like a “taste of home” while at our hospital.