title: How should we prepare rehabilitation sciences students to work with low English-proficient Spanish-speaking patients?
abstract: Misinterpretations or lack of compliance with national standards established to guide health professionals working with low-English-proficient (LEP) patients continue to negatively impact patient care. Most of the literature on training health professionals to work with interpreters focuses on physicians. We reviewed this current literature and propose an interprofessional educational module to extend the interpreter training to other health professions. Our module trains rehabilitation science students from different health disciplines (physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech-language pathology) using strategies from the literature. The educational module is tailored to student's bilingual proficiency, suggests relevant outcomes measures, and highlights unanswered questions and areas for future research.
authors.affiliation: Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, The University of Texas at El Paso, 500 W. University Ave. El Paso, TX 79968, USA. Tel 915-747-8226, fax 915-747-7190. clsummers@utep.edu.
authors.forename: Connie
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Summers
authors.forename: Eugenia
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Gonzalez
authors.forename: Celia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Pechak
mesh_terms: D003142:Communication; D003144:Communication Barriers; D006630:Hispanic or Latino; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D019303:Multilingualism; D012046:Rehabilitation / Q000193:education*; D013334:Students