your LEP patients, you have an excellent chance of improving patient
outcomes and satisfaction. You can determine the demand for these
nurses by looking at the census of your non-English-speaking patient
population. Paying these employees a higher hourly rate is justified,
because their language skills will reduce interpreter costs, improve
outcomes, and reduce the risk of costly adverse events.
27
9. Err on the side of overexplaining
Remember that even bilingual patients can struggle with understand-
ing and communicating about health issues. Something about being
sick causes us to want to revert to our native language. I speak
Spanish fluently, but when I was ill in Mexico, I longed to be able to
tell my providers my problems in English. There's also evidence that
as bilingual patients age, they become less fluent in their second lan-
guage. And certainly, patients recovering from anesthesia may not be
as sharp in their second language as they need to be.
Still work to be done
We're still not anywhere near where we need to be with serving LEP
patients. We need to rethink our approach to this challenge. Yes,
everyone's busy, and it's disruptive to build in the extra time we need
to effectively bridge communication gaps. But those facilities that suc-
ceed in doing so will not only satisfy their very clear moral and legal
obligations. They will also improve their market share. Word gets
around quickly in immigrant communities. If you speak the language,
you will be rewarded with a huge influx of very loyal, deserving
patients.
OSM
2 6 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 9
Dr. Squires (aps6@nyu.edu) is an associate professor at New York University
Rory College of Nursing and faculty for master's in health professions education
at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. References for this article are avail-
able at outpatientsurgery.net/forms.
