Preanesthesia screening phone messages and rate of return based on the primary language of patient

As a part of the surgical process, patients are screened in the preanesthesia services department before surgery. Often phone messages are left in English. The nurses will continue to make multiple calls trying to reach patients. As the patient population continues to diversify, problems in contacting patients have been noted. It was suspected that patients whose primary language was non-English were returning phone messages at a lower rate than patients whose primary language was English. The project was conducted over a 6-week period and a total of 1,438 documented cases were reviewed and included. A Chi-square analysis was performed on the data. Compared with English-speaking patients, non-English-speaking patients required almost twice as many calls on average to make contact. In addition, non-English-speaking patients were less likely to return telephone calls than were the English-speaking patients (P<.001). Furthermore, the percentage of day of service interviews was higher for non-English-speaking patients compared with English-speaking patients (P<.01). Based on these findings, processes for identifying the linguistic needs of our patients have been changed in an effort to provide safer quality care.