Workforce Language Services

More hospitals are offering Spanish classes alongside traditional classes teaching clinical skills in major New York hospitals for their resident physicians.  The move toward providing doctors with training in Spanish is both practical (it can be difficult to find interpreters during certain shifts and patients prefer to speak directly with a doctor that speaks their native language) and cultural. 

One of the Spanish instructors at Yeshiva University’s medical school stressed the importance of cultural sensitivity in patient care as well as the need to beware of using slang terms with patients:

Still, according to Ms. Marzan, of Einstein, stressing cultural sensitivity is also key. For example, some immigrants take herbal supplements to treat their ailments. Patients might also describe symptoms in a way that doctors are not accustomed to. For example, describing pain as being felt everywhere might mean the patient feels a lot of pain, and pain that is described as moving from the stomach to the chest to the face may be a reference to nausea.

Slang should also be taken into account. During the language lesson at NewYork-Presbyterian, students were taking turns naming parts of the human form when one doctor mistakenly used a casual word for buttocks. Laughing, Mr. Shane corrected him. “‘Culo’ is basically ‘ass,’” he said. “You would never say that to a patient.”

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