Affordable Language Services: Implications for Health Care Organizations

Publication Date: April 2007

Publisher: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Author(s): Hablamos Juntos

Research Area: Health

Type: Report

Abstract:

The U.S. is more linguistically diverse now than at any time since the early 1900s. Recent immigration trends have significantly increased the number of people who speak a language other than English at home. This segment of the population grew by 38 percent in the 1980s and by 47 percent in the 1990s. By 2000, 47 million persons over the age of five spoke a language other than English in the home. Rapid growth of the limited English proficiency (LEP) population is emerging as a new risk that few health organizations are prepared to handle. Adding to this complexity for health care organizations is the fact that language barriers affect hundreds of different language communities. The most rapid growth has been in smaller language communities, with the numbers of Russian speakers nearly tripling and Vietnamese and French Creole (including Haitian Creole) speakers doubling over the last decade. Such language barriers threaten the health care of millions of people.

To address this problem, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded Hablamos Juntos (Spanish for “We Speak Together”), an initiative to develop affordable solutions for eliminating language barriers in health care. This work is focused on Spanish speakers, who account for approximately 60 percent of LEP patients seeking health care. This population is comprised of people from 20 different countries where the Spanish language has evolved into many regional varieties. This brief highlights the effects of language barriers on patient safety and quality of health care and the challenges organizations must overcome in order to effectively address language barriers. Drawing on the experiences of the 10 Hablamos Juntos demonstration sites, this brief also highlights the lessons that participating providers, health plans and other organizations learned, and suggests next steps that need to be taken in order to ensure that the nation's LEP patients receive safe, high quality health care.