Language Barriers, Equity, and COVID-19: The Impact of a Novel Spanish Language Care Group

For hospitals that may consider deploying a team such as the SLCG, we can offer a number of concrete actions and policy recommendations. First, in preparation for the COVID surge we identified hospital clinicians with multilingual skills through the deployment of a multilingual registry. Such a registry is critical to understanding which clinicians among existing staff have these skills and who can be approached to join the team. Second, the inpatient medicine surge leadership team at our hospital, immediately recognizing the importance of this effort, developed a staffing strategy to integrate the SLCG into the institutional surge response. The benefit that the team offers needs to be made clear to those at the highest levels of operations and planning. Third, a strong and well-established Center for Diversity and Inclusion, and its leadership, helped facilitate our group’s staffing and organization. For hospitals looking to embrace the strength that their diversity-oriented recruitment efforts have afforded them, we recommend creating a centralized space in which professional relationships can grow and deepen, diverse perspectives can be explored, and embedded cultural and language skills can be championed.

The US healthcare system has much to learn from this phase of the COVID-19 era. Our experience with the Spanish Language Care Group has highlighted the value of language-concordant care, the power of cultural and linguistic competency, and the resiliency that diversity brings to a hospital’s professional staff. Our urgent response to COVID-19 has unroofed a long-simmering challenge: the detriment to care that arises when language becomes an obstacle. We are bringing a new focus to this issue and learning to view it through an equity lens. This is lending new energy to an ongoing conversation about how this hospital thinks about diversity, equity, and healthcare access in these pandemic times and into the hoped-for beyond.

The authors wish to express their profound gratitude to the members of the Spanish Language Care Group who brought such humanity and professionalism to the care of our patients during a uniquely vulnerable time.