Language barrier a bar to good health for many. Here's what RI can do | Opinion

Joseph Hibdon Jr and Omayra Ortega
·3 min read

Mathematics professors Joseph Hibdon Jr., at Northeastern Illinois University, and Omayra Ortega, at Sonoma State University, are data scientists who are also health care advocates.

"For me, knowing the language and not being able to help people just because I don't have a certification that allows me to communicate with people is frustrating. I understand the policy of the hospital but it’s very unfair for me, not being able to help."

− A Rhode Island health care worker

With any doctor’s visit you might have to fill out intake forms or have follow-up care instructions. What do you do if you do not speak the language in which the documentation/instructions are in? Do you call a friend or family member to help? Are you comfortable sharing your medical history with them? These are the concerns of many people in the Providence area.

Access to health care is essential for maintaining both individual and community-wide health. Without this, individuals cannot treat health issues in a timely and effective manner, making the entire community vulnerable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many community members did not receive instructions on protocols because of language barriers.

Dr. Pablo Rodriguez has been advocating for more services for the Spanish-speaking population of Rhode Island for decades. In addition to offering a one-hour Spanish-language radio show on how to best protect yourself against COVID, Dr. Rodriguez launched a much-needed health resources website, nuestrasalud.com (Our Health). This website offers access to general health information and local health care resources.

According to the U.S. Census American Community Survey 2021, approximately one in five Rhode Island residents speak a language other than English at home (21.9%). Of all Rhode Island residents 12.7% (132,551) speak Spanish at home, including 24,844 children ages 5 to 17. Out of the 190,934 people living within the city of Providence in 2020, 37.5% spoke Spanish at home, or 71,601.

According to nuestrasalud.com, the number of Spanish-speaking doctors in Providence is approximately 173. The ratio for Providence is nearly 10 times worse than the national average.

When talking to medical providers in the Providence area for data about the existence of Spanish speaking health care providers, most of those that we talked with expressed the need for this work and desire to push for change.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' most recent set of objectives, the Healthy People 2030report, has one major goal of increasing access to comprehensive, high-quality health care services. Rhode Island must commit to this same goal.

We make the following recommendations for Rhode Island:

  • All medical documents at all public health facilities should be made available in both English and Spanish within two years.

  • Establish plans to translate medical documents into the most prevalent languages spoken in Rhode Island, including Khmer, Portuguese and other Indo-European languages within the next five years.

  • Rhode Island, and Providence more specifically, needs to increase the number of medical translators with a focused effort on increasing the number of translators certified in Spanish.

  • Create programs to fast track medical licensing for foreign-language-speaking doctors with foreign medical degrees.

  • Create programs to train native speakers to become certified medical translators.

  • Existing doctors should be offered training to become proficient in medical Spanish.

  • A publicly available Spanish-language repository for collecting crowd-sourced reviews of medical facilities and evaluating their resources should be established.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Language barrier a bar to good health for many. Here's what RI can do