I had a 78 year old woman patient, bunch of kids and grandkids in the room. The patient spoke only Spanish and the grandson was translating. As I was exiting the grandma patient said something forceful so I turned and asked the man what she'd just said, and it was exactly that: "People in Healthcare should speak Spanish."
I was, well, insulted, speechless, fill in the blank. The patient had not been much of a problem until then. I stared at the grandson and didn't reply, just left. As I thought about it, I started thinking. I'm not a foreigner, why should I learn another language? I'm in the middle of the country to boot! And, why are these people insulting their caregiver anyway?
Talking this out with other nurses, I guess I wasn't the first one to hear such stuff. Is this something I should get used to?
Again, the American Nurses Association recommends that nurses would benefit from learning a foreign language and that patients would get better nursing care and have better outcomes. If you disagree with that, I encourage you to challenge the ANA on their position, I'd be interested to hear their response.
I think most people have taken a foreign language class at some point in HS and college, but many don't remember much from those classes. I know I don't. I know there are some people who have to be fluent in other languages for their jobs. I was just making a point that it's rare, at least around here, and we do have a large population of hispanics. What about police officers, lawyers, and court officials? Is anyone pushing for them to be required to speak Spanish?
Again, the American Nurses Association recommends that nurses would benefit from learning a foreign language and that patients would get better nursing care and have better outcomes. If you disagree with that, I encourage you to challenge the ANA on their position, I'd be interested to hear their response.
The ANA takes all kinds of positions that many of us don't agree with ("BSN-minimum-for-licensure" springs immediately to mind, for one), and I, personally, am not interested in their response to my disagreement. They represent only a v. small number of US RNs (predominantly academics, it appears to me) and have no statutory or regulatory authority. The ANA's position on anything and $1.00 will get you a cup of coffee ...
The ANA takes all kinds of positions that many of us don't agree with ("BSN-minimum-for-licensure" springs immediately to mind, for one), and I, personally, am not interested in their response to my disagreement. They represent only a v. small number of US RNs (predominantly academics, it appears to me) and have no statutory or regulatory authority. The ANA's position on anything and $1.00 will get you a cup of coffee ...
I often disagree with the ANA as well, which is why I mainly refer to their evidence base for their positions, and on this position they have a fairly solid evidence base, even though they do admittedly suck as a professional organization.
For me, the ANA is easy to disagree with, evidence is harder to disagree with.
We have a significant number of spanish speaking patients in my region, I have never had a Tamil speaking patient.
But that doesn't mean you won't ever have one, and to avoid the discriminatory aspect your position seems to scream out about, I think Tamil should be required, as well as every other language in the world, just in case.
But that doesn't mean you won't ever have one, and to avoid the discriminatory aspect your position seems to scream out about, I think Tamil should be required, as well as every other language in the world, just in case.
Last week I dealt with three different languages and none of them were Spanish.
I've seen lots of nursing and/or medical reception/unit secretary jobs where ur required to speak another language, or it says 'Spanish (or whatever) speaking applicant preferred.
But that doesn't mean you won't ever have one, and to avoid the discriminatory aspect your position seems to scream out about, I think Tamil should be required, as well as every other language in the world, just in case.
If I had as many Tamil speaking patients as the number of Spanish speaking patients I have had, then yes I would put learning Tamil on my to-do list. Just like I would learn more about smallpox if I had a significant number of patients with smallpox. That's part of what we do, we assess our patient population's needs and adapt, failure to adapt makes it harder for us to do our job well.
And no, spanish is not the only language I encounter which is why so far I've learned enough russian to get some commonly used info (are you having pain? what kind of pain? where? etc.)
While it's great if they do, I don't expect my patients to completely adapt to my needs, I do think it's important to make some effort to adapt theirs as well.
Specializes in Vents, Telemetry, Home Care, Home infusion.
Better to know Russian if you want to work in a hospital in NE Philadelphia...while one suburban Philly hospital 's next door neighbor High School has 36 commonly spoken languages....guess what that ER is like.
Specializes in Pediatrics, Rural, L&D, Postpartum.
Perfect. So even if I learn Spanish, the patient will be demanding Hispanics to speak their language to them. Guess I'll mark that talent off my list anyway. lol
I seriously do NOT get this attitude. Yes, every now and then it would cause a problem. But before I moved here (Idaho) my patient base was 90% Hispanic and a large portion of them only spoke Spanish. I didn't learn Spanish to make THEIR lives easier.... I learned Spanish to make MY life easier!
As a peds nurse I had on average 4 patients each night. And on average, 2 of them were Spanish speaking only. I didn't want to spend 50% or more of each shift waiting for a translator!
One of the funnier things though, is that there was a nurse on our floor who was of Hispanic descent, third or fourth generation American, I think, who spoke VERY little Spanish, most of it just goofy stuff her aunts and uncles had taught her as a kid. Patients would come to the floor and seek her out to talk to and she'd have to refer them to the fair-skinned, red-headed Irish nurse!
As time went on, I noticed other ethnicities becoming more frequent in my patient population. One was a Burmese language called Karin. Another was a group from Africa that spoke some dialect of Swahili ... AND French. My high school French was nowhere near good enough to do medical stuff, but I could at least introduce myself. Nights that I had to use the translation phone for these patients was enough to make me pull my hair out! Slow, awkward, difficult to get the work done.... and you had to hope there was a translator available to help you!
I have NEVER understood how some of my fellow nurses could choose to spend 50% of each and EVERY shift dealing with that. In fact, I was hunting down resources to try to learn Karin and improve my French just before we decided to move. (None of that seems to help me much here in rural Idaho, though! When I applied for the job I mentioned that I was fluent in medical Spanish because I was used to that being a selling point. The Director of Nursing replied, "Oh, honey, you won't need that here!") *I* didn't like the way it made me feel not being able to speak to my patients.
And yes, I think it made me a better nurse... especially a better pediatric nurse. Being able to comfort my young patients in their native language... being able to pick up on nuances of the situation in the room helped me to piece together more of the situation going on... being able to do education on an on-going basis as needed rather than trying to bunch it all together at a time when the translator was available.... yes, I was a better nurse for my English and Spanish speaking patients than I was to my patients who spoke other languages. And that frustrated me.
Did you know that the Japanese are (so I have been told by language instructors) a little bit leery of foreigners who speak Japanese *too* well? Apparently the idea is that speaking another language fluently gives you leverage and insight into their mind and thinking processes that it is disturbing for them to have someone "foreign" be able to do that. And I think that is true... when we learn another language we actually open our minds to new ways of thinking and seeing the world.
MunoRN, RN
8,058 Posts
Your sarcasm radar needs a tune-up. My point was we don't hold it against poor people that they can't afford healthier food.