Assignment: Denying Emergency Services
A Hill-Burton facility may not adopt patient admission policies that have the effect of excluding persons on grounds of race, color, national origin, creed, or any other ground unrelated to the patient’s need for the service or the availability of the needed service.
Title VI and HHS services regulations require recipients of federal financial assistance from HHS to take reasonable steps to provide meaningful access to limited English proficiency (LEP) persons. Federal financial assistance includes grants, training, use of equipment, donations of surplus property, and other assistance. Recipients of HHS assistance may include hospitals, nursing homes, home health agencies, managed care organizations, universities, and other entities with health or social service research programs. It also may include state Medicaid agencies; state, county, and local welfare agencies; programs for families, youth, and children; Head Start programs; public and private contractors, subcontractors, and vendors; and physicians and other providers who receive federal financial assistance from HHS (USHHS, Office for Civil Rights, n.d.).
A Hill-Burton facility must post notices informing the public of its community service obligations in English and Spanish. If 10% or more of the households in the service area usually speak a language other than English or Spanish, the facility must translate the notice into that language and post it as well.
A Hill-Burton facility may not deny emergency services to any person residing in the facility’s service area on the grounds that the person is unable to pay for those services.
Recipients are required to take reasonable steps to ensure meaningful access to their programs and activities by LEP persons. The obligation to provide meaningful access is fact dependent and starts with an individualized assessment that balances four factors: (1) the number or proportion of LEP persons eligible to be served or likely to be encountered by the program or grantee; (2) the frequency
with which LEP individuals come into contact with the program; (3) the nature and importance of the program, activity, or service provided by the recipient to its beneficiaries; and (4) the resources available to the grantee/recipient and the costs of interpretation/translation services. There is no “ one size fits all” solution for Title VI compliance with respect to LEP persons, and what constitutes “ reasonable steps” for large providers may not be reasonable where small providers are concerned (USHHS, Office for Civil Rights, n.d.).
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.