[…] Natividad Hospital, in the town of Salinas on California’s Central Coast, is ground zero. This hospital, surrounded by fields, serves many farm workers in the valley.

Several years ago, you would’ve been lucky to find even a certified Spanish-language interpreter at Natividad. This was a problem — a problem that became clear to Linda Ford when she became the CEO of the hospital’s foundation nearly a decade ago.
“I first went into the emergency department and asked one of the doctor’s ‘is there anything you need in this emergency department.’ And he was so frustrated and just said, ‘I can’t talk to my patients, I cannot talk to my patients.’”

After doing a language assesment, Ford found that four of the language most commonly spoken by patients coming to the hospital were Native Mexican languages. And within those four Native Mexican languages, there were dozens of variants.

Yet finding indigenous interpreters proved to be a challenge. More.

See: PRI

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