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Celebrating Welsh Language Rights Day in CTM

We are proud to mark Welsh Language Rights Day, a day to promote the rights people in Wales have to use Welsh in their daily lives.

This year we’ve made great strides in developing bilingual services. Many of our wards and services have committed to making changes to embed bilingual services, and they will join many other services across CTM in their commitment to respecting the rights people to have to use Welsh. Da iawn to each and every service showing their support to bilingualism at CTM.

Please remember- if you have an appointment or are visiting any of the areas below, remember to say ‘shw mae’! (shoo my)

Here are some of our service highlights during 2022, and the areas who have completed or pledged to complete their bilingual development action plan…

  • Special Care Baby Unit, Princess of Wales Hospital
  • Children’s Community Services and great to see our new bilingual CTM Children’s Charter
  • Palliative Care Services (Ward 6 Ysbyty Cwm Cynon, Y Bwthyn Royal Glamorgan Hospital & Y Bwthyn Newydd, Bridgend)
  • Paediatric Services across our three district hospital sites
  • Endoscopy at Prince Charles Hospital and Princess of Wales Hospital
  • Ysbyty Cwm Rhondda site
  • Ward 6 Prince Charles Hospital
  • Maxillofacial Outpatients Prince Charles Hospital
  • School Nursing Service across CTM
  • Community Health and Health Visiting Teams
  • Gynaecology and Sexual Health Service at Dewi Sant and Ysbyty Cwm Rhondda
  • Continuing Health Care and NHS Funded Nursing Care Team
  • Pre-assessment Unit, Prince Charles Hospital
  • Maternity Ward, Prince Charles Hospital
  • Ward C3, Ysbyty Cwm Rhondda
  • Community Diabetes Nursing
  • District Nursing RTE,
  • Community Respiratory Nursing
  • Ward 12, Princess of Wales Hospital
  • Pharmacy team, Royal Glamorgan Hospital
  • Radiology, Princess of Wales Hospital
  • And finally Therapies across the organisation, Speech & Language Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Podiatry, Dietetics and Physiotherapy who have begun auditing their areas recently and began preparing their own action plan for any small improvements needed to an already proactively bilingual team.

Patients and their families have comprehensive rights to use Welsh with their local Health Board, and you can also expect to see and use more Welsh with GP practices, dental services, pharmacies and ophthalmic services. To this end, our Primary Care partners have also been working hard this year to improve their bilingual provision.

Last year we featured Bron-y-garn Surgery in Maesteg. In the spotlight this year is Roderick’s Dental, who have dental services in several locations across the Health Board area. For Welsh Language Rights Day this year, a dental nurse for Roderick’s Dental shared this with us:

“I have been a dental nurse for 22 years and over that time have seen how important communication is, not only for the patients, but also the staff. Studies show that communicating with patients in their first language lead to improved outcomes and understanding of the care and treatment they are receiving. Attending the dentist can be an anxious time for many, our patients matter to us and we will do all we can to make their experience more positive.”

“We have 8 Welsh speakers across four of our sites, Bryant, Cefn Coed, Courtland and 1 practice in Swansea bay. We also have a nurse interested in taking a course to learn Welsh. Over the last year, with the assistance of the Welsh translation service in CTM UHB, we have managed to translate the majority of our patient’s information displayed in reception. Alongside this, signs have been placed in the waiting room to inform patients if there are no Welsh speakers and that we can offer a Welsh language service to them at another site if they wish. Each site has a list of Welsh speakers and at which practice they are based, available in reception.”

“In June 2022, we introduced language preferences. Patients are to be asked at reception what their choice of language is, and we have created a tool on our system to record this. Between July and October 21% of patients seen on average have been asked their language preference and it has been recorded. We hope to improve this after staff have taken part in the Welsh language awareness training which we have booked over the next few weeks.”

To find out if a dental service near you has Welsh speaking staff, or indeed any Primary Care provider, go to our website homepage, scroll down to ‘Find your local NHS service’ and enter your postcode. All services with Welsh speaking staff will be noted there with the orange ‘Iaith Gwaith’ Cymraeg logo. Da iawn to Roderick’s Dental and all Primary Care providers who make the effort to provide services in Welsh.

We are committed to respecting and promoting the rights patients and their families have to use Welsh, because we know that using Welsh in the health sector can be a matter of quality of care and not simply choice. We understand how important it is for people to use their preferred language with us at an often difficult and emotional time, and we appreciate the important role language plays in assessment, diagnosis and treatment.

Watch this short video explaining what your rights to Welsh are across the healthcare system.

Hywel Daniel, Executive Director for People and executive sponsor for Welsh, marked this year’s Welsh Language Rights by saying:

Welsh Language Rights day has become a great opportunity for us to show our commitment to Welsh as an organisation. Nearly thirty wards and services this year alone have pledged to improve their bilingual provision, demonstrating the dedication of our workforce to offer care that puts the patient first, which of course for many means care in Welsh. We’ve been working hard to weave Welsh into organisational culture and ways of working this year, so that it becomes more than something we know we need to do; rather, something we’re dedicated to accomplishing. Our event recently to mark the publication of the More Than Just Words 5-year Plan, alongside the new resources we’ve had created to share with staff, has begun this work. With nearly one hundred colleagues in attendance, it was a great opportunity to reframe Welsh language services not just as a right but also as a need, and we will continue this work over the coming months as we work in partnership to develop our bilingual provision. We’ve made great strides this year and I am looking forward to supporting our staff as we continue to embed Welsh in all we do.

Use your Welsh with us!

If you would like to get in touch with us to share your experience of using Welsh with the Health Board, please email CTT_WelshLanguage@wales.nhs.uk.

We welcome and encourage all feedback.

 

07/12/2022