According to the 5 Towns Jewish Times, Beth Israel Medical Center in New York is hiring two individuals as “patient navigators” to better serve the Jewish communities of Manhattan and Brooklyn. The initiative and goals are to increase the overall cultural sensitivity to the Jewish community at all Beth Israel inpatient and outpatient sites; provide services that will better assist Bikur Cholim and Hatzolah ambulance volunteers in their ongoing efforts to save lives and provide special care for ill individuals.
The two navigators are Joseph Deutsch and Dov Jacob. Mr. Deutsch has been a paramedic with Hatzolah Volunteer Ambulance Corporation for 15 years and is from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Mr. Jacob has been an EMT with Hatzolah for ten years and is from the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
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4 Responses
I don’t know much about this….what are the “cultural” issues that arise when dealing with Jewish patients. I assume Kashrus, Shabbos & Tznius…..what else?
These three – in reverse order – seem to be the hardest for most hospital staff to comprehend. My experience – for myself and for family and friends – has been that ALL hospitals tend to treat patients as objects rather than human beings. A patient needs an “advocate” to assure – as much as possible – that doctors, nurses, aides and so on – pay attention to the whole patient with courtesy and respect.
Sometimes various staff assume the attitude of “I know what is best” , which might be medically true, but ignores human factors as basic as PT (patient) comfort.
An advocate needs to be aware of possible impact of certain approaches/procedures to the extent he/she knows the PT. Tzniut, in today’s world, is very hard to persuade many people in certain ethnic/social groups about. They don’t have any of it in their personal lives, so they can’t relate to it in another person’s life.
Also, it tends to make them ‘uncomfortable’, and it “makes work”.
Being more knoweldgeable than the usual family member gives the PT advocate an advantage, but it must be used with great diplomacy, plus firmness. (I see this is becoming an essay, so I’ll stop shortly.) Suffice it to say, the “cultural issues”, as you put it, are fundamental to assuring that the PT is treated properly in a human and medical way. If you’d like to pursue this in a dialogue, please contact me via TYW.
Don’t get too much of a chip on your shoulder. The likes of you are being used by Beth Israel in order to attract Jewish clients. The demographics in the neighborhood have changed and what was once a Jewish hospital is now Asian and Spanish. The hospital sees this and realizes they are doomed in the long-run, unless they convince the Jews in Brooklyn (mainly W-burg) to start thinking about BI as a first choice. BI figures that if the cater to Hatzolah members, then they are directly affecting decision makers, because it is often Hatzolah that decides which hospital the patient goes to.
The main goal of every hospital in NYC is to get frum women to have babies by them. One of the hospitals near me upgrades all frum couples to the VIP suite. All of my friends tell me “that hospital is great they got a plasma tv in the labor room for mo watch while my wife is in labor”.