BACKGROUND Patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) represent a growing proportion of the US population and are at risk of receiving suboptimal care due to difficulty communicating with healthcare providers who do not speak their language. Medical school curricula are required to prepare students to care for all patients, including those with LEP, but little is known about how well they ...

OBJECTIVE To describe perceptions of how a lack of house staff Spanish proficiency adversely affects communication with Spanish-speaking families with limited English proficiency (LEP). METHODS An anonymous, structured questionnaire was administered to the house staff an of urban, university-affiliated children's hospital that serves a population in which 10%-20% have LEP. RESULTS Ninety-fo...

OBJECTIVE To determine if professional medical interpreters have a positive impact on clinical care for limited English proficiency (LEP) patients. DATA SOURCES A systematic literature search, limited to the English language, in PubMed and PsycINFO for publications between 1966 and September 2005, and a search of the Cochrane Library. STUDY DESIGN Any peer-reviewed article which compared at...

OBJECTIVE To examine pediatrician weight-management communication with overweight Latino children and their parents and whether communication differs by pediatrician-patient language congruency. METHODS Mixed-methods analysis of video-recorded primary care visits with overweight 6- to 12-year-old children. Three independent reviewers used video/transcript data to identify American Academy of ...

BACKGROUND To meet federal requirements under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the state of California instituted policies requiring that comprehensive mental health services in native languages be made available to limited English proficiency (LEP) populations when concentrations exceed "threshold" levels. METHODS This paper builds on promising results from quantitative evaluations by repor...

INTRODUCTION 26 million Americans have limited English proficiency (LEP). It is well established that language barriers adversely affect health and health care. Despite growing awareness of language barriers, there is essentially a void in the medical literature regarding the influence of language disparity on pediatric surgery patients. This study was designed to assess the impact of patient-p...

OBJECTIVES Cancer is the leading cause of death among Asian Americans. Chinese Americans comprise the largest Asian American ethnic group. Low health literacy (LHL) is associated with lower cancer screening rates, but this association has not been studied in Chinese Americans. We examined the relationship between LHL and meeting US Preventive Service Task Force (USPSTF) guidelines for cervical,...