This paper examines whether workers with limited English skills suffer adverse effects in the labor market when states declare English the official language. Official English laws may harm individuals who do not speak English very well if employers view the laws as allowing or requiring them to adopt workplace Englishonly rules that lower the demand for limited-English-proficient workers. Using...

BACKGROUND Approximately 3.5 million U.S. schoolchildren are limited in English proficiency (LEP). Disparities in children's health and health care are associated with both LEP and speaking a language other than English at home, but prior research has not examined which of these two measures of language barriers is most useful in examining health care disparities. OBJECTIVES Our objectives we...

Purpose/Objective(s): Treatment delay is a significant impediment to effective cancer management and could potentially impact disease progression and survival, especially in Head and Neck Cancer (HNC) patients who are often diagnosed with locally advanced stage disease. The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of patient and tumor characteristics on time-to-treatment (TTT) from dia...

Technology advances, especially in the Internet, provide new tools to deliver health education to limited English proficient immigrants. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative descriptive study of older limited English proficient Chinese immigrants’ perspectives regarding computer-based health education. The sample consisted of 33 foreign-born Chinese recruited in Seattle, Washington...

Inadequate communication between patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) and providers can be associated with lower access to health care. The purpose of this research was to determine if there is a significant difference among those persons whose primary language is English and those with LEP in ability to access care and preventative screenings and perception of interaction with their...

BACKGROUND Language barriers are associated with poor health care outcomes, and barriers exist for timely in-person interpretation. Although available on-demand, telephonic interpretation remains underutilized. This study evaluates whether a quality improvement (QI) intervention was associated with rates of interpretation and parent-reported language service use at a children's hospital. METH...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES South Africa has 11 official languages, but most psychiatrists can speak only English and Afrikaans and there are no formal interpreter posts in the mental healthcare system. As a result clinicians communicate with patients who have limited English language proficiency (LEP) without the use of interpreters. We present case material, constituting recordings of interacti...