Bilingual Nurses

[txnexus]

I found this article to be quite off the mark. The emphasis seems to be that of encouraging nurses to learn spanish. In my opinion...the emphasis should be on helping mexican immigrants and those with limited English-speaking ability to learn English. When I lived in Italy a number of years ago, I would never have expected the staff to learn English in order for me to communicate with them. Instead, I brushed up on my Italian and made the effort to assimilate. The argument that America doesn't have an official language is a rather vacuous point of view at best. English is the defacto official language of America. If immigrants choose not to learn English, then that is their right, but the lack of English ability on their part should never impinge on my credentials as a nurse.
I would also point out to recruiters who use this e-zine as a recruiting tool to be very careful in your wording especially when using the term "bilingual". There is a court case pending now where a job applicant checked "yes" when asked if she was bilingual. She was hired and when they discovered she didn't speak spanish, she was terminated. She sued on the basis of the fact that the term bilingual means, literally, two tongues". She in fact spoke perfect English and French so she was, in fact, bilingual. A lower court upheld her suit and the company has filed an appeal. Point is, make sure you are very clear when hiring anyone about what is expected.

[medhunting]

Well, it is all about business. It normally should be the business to meet the client needs not client to meet the business needs. Therefore, encouraging the service provider to learn Spanish is more reasonable than otherwise.

[txnexus]

Normally, in a usual business climate, I would agree. But if you extrapolate payment data from various client demographics (which I have done as a grad school project), it is quite clear that reimbursements from the Latino community lag far behind other minority groups....Asians and African Americans being the two most common examples. When doing a cost benefit analysis, one has to consider ROI as a primary criterion for business planning. Clearly, if the business model were applied without regard to societal expectations...the Latino market would be even more underserved than it is now as health care organizations pulled out of the Latino market.