The National Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS) Standards
What is Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS)?
CLAS is a way to improve the quality of services provided to all individuals, which could ultimately help reduce health disparities. CLAS is about respect and responsiveness: Respect the whole individual and respond to the individual’s health needs and preferences.
Health disparities in our nation are well-documented. Providing CLAS is one strategy to help eliminate health disparities. By tailoring services to an individual’s cultural and language needs, health professionals can help bring about positive health outcomes.
The provision of health services that are respectful of and responsive to the health beliefs, practices and needs of patients can help close the gap in health outcomes.
The National CLAS Standards are intended to promote health, improve quality and help eliminate health care disparities by establishing a blueprint for health and health care organizations to:
Principal Standard
Provide effective, understandable and respectful quality care and services that respond to cultural health beliefs and practices, languages, health literacy and other communication needs.
Governance, Leadership and Workforce
- Advance and sustain organizational governance and leadership that promotes CLAS through policy, practices and allocated resources.
- Recruit, promote, equip and support a governance, leadership, and workforce that respond to the digital, cultural and language needs of the population.
- Educate and train governance, leadership and workforce regularly on CLAS practices and resources
Communication and Language Assistance
- Offer language assistance to individuals who have limited English proficiency and/or other communication needs, at no cost to them, to facilitate timely access to all health care and services.
- Inform all individuals, in writing and orally, of the availability of language assistance services in English and other languages that serve their linguistic needs.
- Ensure the competence of individuals providing language assistance through training and certification, when available, recognizing that the use of untrained individuals and/or minors as interpreters should be avoided and discouraged.
- Provide easy-to-understand digital and print materials and signage in the languages commonly used by the populations in the service area.
Engagement, Continuous Improvement, and Accountability
- Establish culturally and linguistically appropriate goals, policies and management accountability, and infuse them throughout the organization’s planning and operations.
- Conduct ongoing assessments of the organization’s integration of CLAS related activities and measures into quality improvement activities.
- Collect and maintain accurate and reliable demographic data to monitor and evaluate the impact of CLAS on health outcomes and to inform service delivery.
- Conduct regular assessments of community health assets and needs and use the results to plan and implement services that respond to the cultural and linguistic needs of populations in the service area.
- Partner with the community to design, implement and evaluate cultural and linguistically appropriate practices and impact.
- Create culturally and linguistically appropriate processes to identify, prevent and resolve conflicts, complaints or grievances.
- Communicate the organization’s progress in implementing and sustaining CLAS to all stakeholders, constituents and the general public.
2025 marks the 25th anniversary of the National CLAS Standards. For a quarter of a century, these standards have guided health organizations’ efforts to deliver care that is responsive to the cultural beliefs and communication needs of ALL patients. CLAS is a way to improve the quality of services, which will ultimately help reduce health disparities. The most recent revision of the standards incorporated items that will address organizational and service quality improvement.
NCDHHS’ Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities (OMHHD) is fully committed to the overarching goal of reducing health disparities by increasing unimpeded access to health services. OMHHD offers trainings, in-services and consultative support in all aspects of CLAS promotion and implementation to both internal partners and community-based provider organizations. In the past year alone, OMHHD has worked alongside health departments and CBOs to promote and apply the Standards in all aspects of health care delivery.