Over the past eight months, I’ve rotated at the Palo Alto VA, Santa Clara Kaiser, Stanford outpatient family medicine, and pediatrics clinics, and most recently, at Santa Clara Valley. At the VA and Kaiser, all my patients spoke English. Occasionally, at Stanford’s outpatient sites, our patients spoke a language other than English; however, this never felt like a barrier to care because Stanford had phone interpreters available, as well as iPads on wheels that you could use to videoconference in an interpreter. These resources made it feel as though the interpreter was right there in the room with us. And indeed, they could not only hear the patient’s words but also see their expressions, adding an extra dimension to the interpreting services they generously provided.
Valley, however, felt like a different world. As a county hospital, Valley doesn’t often have the luxury of flashy resources. I spent this past month there, on my general surgery/trauma rotation. On morning rounds each day, we would check on each one of our patients, asking whether their pain was under control, if they were able to eat post-surgery, if they had walked around the ward to get back to their baseline activity level, and more. These rounds would take place as early as 6:15 a.m., and they were efficient, since operating room cases would begin at 7:30 a.m.
At various point in the month, our Valley team had patients who spoke only Spanish, only Korean, only Cantonese, and only Vietnamese. Sometimes, we got lucky, and a member of the nursing staff spoke one of these languages. But at other times, we worked through hand gestures and simple words to try and ascertain patient pain, symptoms, etc. Phone interpreters were an option, but the early timing and rapid pace of rounds made it cumbersome to call an interpreter. We usually circled back in the afternoon with a phone interpreter — and if we happened to have multiple traumas that came into the hospital that day, it would be later rather than earlier that we returned to the patient’s bedside. Putting myself in patients’ shoes, I imagine how frustrating it must have been for them, to feel both dependent on the medical team for care as well as helpless to communicate how they felt and what they wanted.
I began to think about how this problem could be fixed, and my thoughts took me back to my middle and high-school years. In middle school, I was required to take at least one foreign language. I chose Spanish and continued taking Spanish throughout high school (then promptly forgot everything when I went to college, making me rather useless on surgery rounds). Wouldn’t it be useful to have a similar language requirement in medical school? I don’t mean a comprehensive foreign language course. Instead, I think it would be meaningful to know key words and phrases — Do you have pain? Are you able to eat? Where does it hurt? — in, let’s say, the ten most common languages spoken in the particular geographic region a medical school is located in.
I know, I know, medical school curricula are already teeming with courses and requirements, and adding a language requirement feels like just one extra thing. But, if it makes a valuable difference in patient care, isn’t it a worthwhile addition? It’s certainly something to ponder. As for me, I just downloaded Duolingo on my iPad, so if you catch me awkwardly practicing my Spanish out loud in any one of my favorite Palo Alto cafés, you’ll know why!
Hamsika Chandrasekar is a medical student who blogs at Scope.
Image credit: Shutterstock.com
