tv [untitled] June 29, 2014 8:00pm-8:31pm PDT
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background and we remain very very focussed on not just serving and providing language access to all of our business and workforce clients but also making sure that we're working closely with them so i want to go through two key areas that we focus on first in our economic development and then workforce development. economic development we have bilingual staff who are specifically focussed on providing direct business service to small businesses in particular where they are located. this team in our office it's part of the mayors jobs plan and it's two team members. working throughout the city to provide direct services to businesses. one of the key aspects of the job
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squad initiative is not waiting for a business to call us and saying i have a problem but being proactive how can we help. and the ada program but also to ensure that we're selling other programs and making businesses aware of other programs. the office of small business which, supervisor, i know you were a leader in helping to create, continues to provide services to small businesses another key area where our small business team is focussed is on the implementation of outreach workshops designed specifically to address appropriate specific programs like the ada program and i want to spend a second
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talking about how we designed this program. this really came out of -- supervisors, you know well, many times just sending a letter to get a letter with all this intimidating language citing statute and with the support of all 3 of you supervisors we've implemented a program and expanding the program that works with these small businesses to provide information about what they need to grow and be successful and we conducted a number of bilingual workshops principally with spanish speaking and chinese speaking small business
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owners. again language access is -- we have a number of training programs specifically designed for both chinese and spanish speaking populations this slide gives you a couple of examples of a number of those including a culinary program at city college i want to point out the key program as part of our program we discovered is key and intregal we have bilingual staff at these 4 access points and it lists there what languages are spoken at each of those and we have begun providing services
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for the tagali population and we continually want to improve and do better. so we need to continually do better we're going to remain focussed on leveraging our resources and help them better serve these populations we need to do more to translate our written material and see provide translation services. we want to continue to work with miss pawn and finally we certainly want to work with other tier 1 departments to share best practices and happy to take any additional questions that you might have or -- >> do you have data on how many requests come in for different languages?
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>> specific languages? >> yeah. >> i can get that for you. the numbers that i have in front of me are only the ones that are -- i only have a number of served but i can get for you. >> how many of them are coming from different places and are we addressing those needs. we're certainly addressing it for chinese and spanish i'm concerned about the others. >> all the requests we received were in spanish and chinese then i don't believe we ended up using the language line service. >> so you don't have a sense of demand for other language needs? >> not in front of me i apologize i don't have that.
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>> then the question i asked do you think it's necessary to have in-house capability. >> i think having both is really really good. we've enjoyed and really really appreciated director pawns and see them as experts in making sure we're doing it in the right way and in the way that's most productive. we're experts in economic development and appreciate that partnership to help us do better we want to continue to strengthen the expertise we have. >> okay thank you. >> and i would just say that i would really commend oewd i've seen the changes throughout the years where you have hired the individuals who have the
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additional language capabilities. aside from the data you are trying to track i think it's just as important to also recognize that the work that you do to go out there to reach people like francis and can speak to people in chinese has been instrumental so i really just want to commend you foreseeing that as an important core value of your department's functions and i hope you continue to be able to incorporate that into your hiring. >> great appreciate the presentation. >> next we'll hear from real estate. rob rider. >>.
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>> thank you supervisors. okay. first off thank you for having us here and i'll explain what we're going to be doing with our proto type. we're tracking client translation requests at our front desk as well. in the corner here you will see a copy of our tracking sheet that we're now using a basic spreadsheet but adequate for our needs to track any requests that come through our door and be able to input into next years report as well something that was missing from
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this years. and our touch screen directory map and departmental kiosk and we'll discuss a bit more as the presentation goes on and installing multiple signage boards these board will have major departments restrooms so as people enter the building, they will be able to see that right away and hopefully that will be of some assistance until the kiosk system is up and running. we've also already instituted brochures and have a small ee evacuation map on them and we've been preparing this proto type kiosk
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and we're going to start in city hall and hopefully be able to take that out to the whole city real estate portfolio as time goes on our departmental budget is our next slide the kiosk signage are budgeted at $150,000 our funding source the proposed maintenance budget for city hall and one kiosk at each of the entrances. the digital kiosk will have two phases -- our english version the first phase in 3 months allow for equipment procurement and content development with our
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departments and also working regarding our staff resources make sure that we're resourced properly to run this system here. 60 days after that the implementation and testing and evaluation and phase 2 translation of materials and we're budging 30-days per language. some of the challenges ahead on this system will be the target our target date for launching the kiosk the end of september with some challenges. the procurement process will be a challenge and meeting ada requirements and compliance that will require the work of our carpenter and working with the mayors office on disability to make sure that what we're building will be
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something that will be compliant and our city administrator will be reached for criminal information documents to be translated and will require substantial lead time and follow up to ensure that these documents are properly translates and with that i'd like to go into our demo of the kiosk one of our partners in producing not only the kiosk but a lot of the programming for it. >> okay good afternoon supervisors. >> speak into the mic. >> for this demonstration i'm going to be moving around here
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so here we go. okay so essentially we're the technology partner for real estate in terms of implementing this project and this system itself is a very scaleable system as the user enters the building they can select from the five different languages that we're going to be rolling out initially for this demonstration we completed an english version mock up for demonstration purposes. so this could be an announcement from the city itself so as i go through the screens i'm going to select the english version here and you can see this on the monitor yourself. here we go. now we're seeing the live
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demo so this is general information about the building. going to the next screen again more general information and then evacuation maps or maps of the building itself and the directory for the building so when i select the directory i get the various departments in the building and for this demonstration purpose for example the board of supervisor's this takes us to the board's website for now eventually populated with information from the board pertaining to the services and information getting to the board so go back here and we go into one of our faq's so again this is helping the user getting access or guiding the user to the various departments so for example at the county
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clerks office we have information about marriage licenses and going back -- so then, again the system itself is designed to be scaleable we're rolling this out initially in city hall with the 4 kiosks but in the future utilizing this system to other city buildings and this system will support -- the user will be able to navigate and get information but we can also post boards to send out the various information that we post right now on the bull etin
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board so we utilize this system for sfgov tv so it's also driven by this same system. >> if i could ask just a question about that first of all i'm very excited to physically see the manifestation of something we've been talking about for years now. could i just ask why has it taken so long for this to get up? >> we wanted to get a system that's scaleable for all city buildings and not just city hall so this particular system that we selected, it's being
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used as a server for sfgov tv rolled out initially in city hall. let's say puc wants to utilize the same system they can tag on to what we've been building the departments will be able to get access to their own content update the content themselves do not rely on real estate or relying on a central department to manage their information they will have the capability to update and post their own information. >> when is the implementation -- is it chinese or spanish -- what's the date for that? >> approximately 6 months from now approximately. >> as you know every time we've talked about this -- 4 years ago i hate to bring that up but that's been the approximate
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reality around this conversation so -- >> let me provide some additional information we're on schedule right now we're building the english version and as you can see we have the physical hardware in place and so the next step is building out the template that's going to be used by the various departments and getting the information from the various department but i think really it's going to be dependent on the information or how quickly we can get the information and it's going to be in place probably within the next 30-day and see this mock up demo we were able to build this fairly quickly with the information gathered in-house so i'm confident within the 6 months period we will be able to deliver on the five language that we identify.
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>> you said then 3 months -- when -- >> in 3 months this will be rolled out in the english version at the 4 locations in city hall so our plan is to roll out a new language every 30-days you know i think you know that is a conservative schedule because we're going to be asking departments to provide us with the translated information as we're working with the english version so as we're rolling out the english version we're going to be going to the departments to get the translated information to populate this system. >> spanish or chinese you expect to be the first? >> the chinese, spanish, order, filipino then russian. >> so okay what i'd like to suggest it would be great if we could roll out that first language say september -- if
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you just as we rolled out the paper kiosk a couple of years ago when we roll out the chinese kiosk kiosk we can do that with a little bit of public relations outreach so that the community knows about this and i'd love to work with miss pawn's office and your office to do that and then in october if we're doing spanish we'd like to do that again with the spanish media so that we have a rhythm in a couple of months on how we're letting the public know about this. >> okay great thanks. >> appreciate your work on this and look forward to finally seeing this happen i know this has been a 4-year conversation. >> looking forward to working with you to make this happen and director pawn's group as well. >> great thank you. >> our next department is the
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department of public health. and appreciate you being here. >> president chiu and supervisors i'm here for director garcia and for public health language access is a big issue partly because of how sensitive health is as well as the outcome when people don't speak the language or don't understand the language, it could be potentially harmful in terms of the health outcome so i think dph has looked at language aspect as a key component of what they do and as of for last year spent close to $5.6 million on language access and out of that 5.6, 3.6
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was in translation services. we currently have about 1000 bilingual staff and even though we actually have more than that because there are people who do not receive bilingual pay who are actually bilingual and provide bilingual services and 44 thousand have limited are limited english speaking individuals of which 63 percent are spanish followed by chinese and canton ese the expansion of vmi we began to implement in 2010 and we had problems with
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fiber connection that i am happy to report that we have made significant progress most of the sites currently have fiber connection and san francisco general most of the primary care and specialty clinics now have vmi and one clinic is online at laguna honda also now have vmi and the new hospital being built every in patient unit will have the ability for any level of interpreter service and we cover the languages more importantly we have access to one hundred additional languages for clients. we've made significant progress also in that at the moment we can actually translate materials
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between 7 and 14 days which is quite a record that we're very proud of. the interesting thing is even though we're talking about language it's one of the areas also that we're getting lots of demands around braille so that's an area that we're trying to work on and trying to develop expertise around braille and getting access to translation services for braille and something not spoken to is san francisco is getting older so we're getting requests for -- fonts we've also made a -- every clinic has signage and we're able to provide it and another thing is actually have the units in the department of public health totally responsible for
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language assets and cultural competency unit and responsible for getting requests translation and making sure people trained around cultural competency and the quality control to make sure that the languages are accurate because many people who translate some of them are actually not in their own languages so it's important that you have quality control so you can understand what's being spoken so that's something else that we're doing in dph and if you have more questions, this is zachary and they are both from the department and darlene is responsible for our language assets programming and does a lot of work and zachary is from h.r. >> our public health and
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healthcare institutions are some of the most frontline services do you have a sense of how often does someone come in and are there issues such that the system just doesn't work or do you feel right now it's seamless? >> i think i will say it's very seamless that's one of the things that we believe that the best way to provide language access is actually having staff in staff to provide it and we make every effort that in every clinic whether san francisco general or community based clinics we have that capability. if we don't have the capability we have an interpreter service that's actually run by the san
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francisco general automatic transfer seem less transfer the patient themselves probably won't know that and then the dmi i don't know if you have seen the vmi the video medical interpretation but also we have -- >> i know i hear information from members of the community about challenges they have and i wondered is there some way for a complaint based system to get feedback after the fact there are san franciscans who feel like the language needs weren't met but that's probably a longer term conversation that we need to have with other departments. >> last year we actually had 10 complaints and 10 of the
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complaints were resolved. >> what were the nature of those complaints? >> timeliness and initially had to do with the translation itself which is why darlene -- the goal of that training is not only the language itself but sometimes body language can tell something different and mean something different to the patient so we're working around that and making sure the training is consistent and because again when you are doing translation there's a lot of concern about the person you have in the room and so we have to figure out ways of making that patient comfortable. that's also a source of complaint because some people might not want another person in the room so we have to go through the process of explaining why that person is in the room and also some
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people might come and actually want a family member and we have sensitive topics that we actually don't want the family member to be part of the encounter. >> again appreciate your work. >> thank you. >> and with that unless there are any other departments here to present -- recreation and park? yes come on up. wasn't sure if you were going to be here. >> good afternoon supervisors. i'm the recreation business manager for the recreation and parks department i'd like to say a couple of things i'm very excited about the kiosk and vmi i've never heard of that so i'm going to look into that when i get back to the office so recreation and parks part of our mission is to provide healthy recreational opportunities for people in san francisco for everybody in san
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francisco as well as parks so essentially every single employee that works for our department provides direct service to the public. we have over a thousand employees ranging from program coordinators and soccer coaches to garden ers and park patrol officers so we are all day every day interacting with the public in various ways. currently this year our budget for translation and interpretation was set at $40,000 of which so far we spent close to 30 thousand compared to last year at 15 thousand so doubled the amount of language translation services we provided.
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