Florida Clinic warns nurses only speak English or be fired

[NRSKarenRN, BSN, RN]

Found at ABC News:

Clinic warns nurses only speak English or be fired

Quote

Seven Puerto Rican health care workers say supervisors at a Florida government-run clinic warned them to stop speaking Spanish among themselves or they would get fired.

The women work at the Florida Health Department clinic in Haines City. A Monday statement from the community group La Mesa Boricua de Florida says the group filed a human resources complaint and wrote a letter to the Florida Department of Health....

...The workers say the job required they be bilingual because of the Hispanic patients. Nurse Mairyli Miranda says she and her coworkers speak in English with non-Spanish-speaking patients and staff but choose their native language to talk to one another.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission states English-only rules may violate federal laws unless they are "justified by business necessity."

Placing my prior Managers hat on, from a business perspective:

If the workers can speak English then they should, except, when dealing with Non-English speaking patients. Doing otherwise does nothing but create dysfunction and disorder in the workplace as staff that don't speak Spanish may miss out on clinic patient crucial information being discussed, especially in sidebar conversations. Hard feelings and discontent occurs as colleagues not able to participate in conversations. Patient care can be affected, needs to be avoided. Spanish conversations fine for Spanish patient interactions and break room.

I so wish I took HS Spanish like my girlfriends instead of French suggested by my mom, only used French once in a patient encounter, while unable to assist Spanish clients calling into my home health Central Intake Dept. Polish + Russian only speaking patients/family members frequently encountered too. Polish Grandparents discouraged speaking Polish with me as I needed to "be American, speak English" -- makes it hard to go food shopping now in Polish speaking stores in Philadelphia. Over the last 10 years, I actively recruited bilingual staff to be able to interact with people calling my intake dept. along with using AT+T language line.

Looking for other opinions + experiences.

[AutumnDraidean]

I agree that nurses should primarily speak English in the clinical setting. However I would need to know more before I could form an opinion. I worked for a hospital that says you must either be a certified medical interpreter for a given language or use the AT&T language line when dealing with patients. That policy may be over the top too!!

[Rose_Queen, BSN, MSN, RN]

3 hours ago, AutumnDraidean said:

I worked for a hospital that says you must either be a certified medical interpreter for a given language or use the AT&T language line when dealing with patients. That policy may be over the top too!!

I'd say that's on par with pretty much all facilities. It would make sense that the facility validates that those doing translation are doing it the right way and can handle medical/nursing lingo.