UC Merced Undergraduate Research Journal

Throughout the history of modern-day medicine, clinicians and medical professionals have seen sickness and disease as having discrete biological causes. The health care system has seemed to be lacking in advancement recently, with provided care focusing on symptoms of disease and sickness, while not building a trusting relationship with the patient. For clinicians or medical professionals to effectively treat a patient and their underlying sickness and or disease, health care workers must be able to navigate across language barriers to aid in linguistically and culturally diverse communities. For clinicians and health care professionals to gain these skills, they must be trained throughout their medical school education with more respect for immigrant, migrant, and or minority Spanish-speaking patients by being taught Medical Spanish with a focus on communication skills. The use of Spanish in patient care by clinicians allows for multilingual patients who speak Spanish to understand one another through the variability of language for a focus on patient–centered care and providing the best equitable health care possible.