A medical Spanish curriculum for resident physicians increases language-concordant encounters and reduces reliance on interpreter phones

Narrative synthesis #

Training providers as bilingual/dual-role clinicians shifts care toward direct language-concordant communication and away from interpreter-phone use, which the authors describe as slower, lower-quality, and impersonal. This is a single-program, non-randomized comparison, so the claim remains tentative.

"resident physicians feel that becoming proficient in medical Spanish improves their efficiency in the ED as they save time by not having to use interpreter phones" (Stoneking, 2016)