By Gerald Korson
Voice correspondent

At a busy walk-in medical clinic in the East Bay, a nurse takes an elderly Laotian man to an examination room to assess his condition. She takes his blood pressure, checks his temperature, and then asks him to describe his health concern. The man speaks his native Lao, but only a few words of English; his daughter, who accompanied him, knows a bit more English but isn’t much help.

All the nurse can ascertain is that the man has abdominal pain. The physician on duty must do her best to diagnose and treat his symptoms with precious little information.

In a culturally diverse region such as the greater Bay Area, this scenario is all too common. California is home to immigrants and refugees who speak little or no English. When they require basic services such as health care, the communication gap between provider and patient can be immense.

A program that begins this month seeks to bridge that gap. Directed by Catholic Charities of the East Bay and funded by a generous grant from Chevron Oil Co. in Richmond, the program will train 50 low-income, limited-English speakers to serve as bilingual certified medical assistants, said Lisa Raffel, program director for the new Clinical Medical Assistant Bilingual Training Project.

“I hear a lot of stories of health care not going well for persons who do not speak English well,” Raffel told The Catholic Voice. “We’re hoping our grads will play a key role in providing quality care because they will often be the ones translating for the medical staff. They’re really the people who help the patient get comfortable, the link between patient and doctor.”

Certified medical assistants are already in great demand, and many more are likely to be needed in hospitals and clinics as the national health care reform plan is implemented, she added. The training program will not only supply bilingual CMAs and facilitate health care for immigrants and refugees, but it will also empower low-income families to earn a decent living in a marketable profession.

Based out of Serra Adult School in Richmond with the collaboration of West Contra Costa Adult Education and the RichmondWORKS employment initiative, the program offers its students six months of intensive training in subjects such as medical terminology, body structure and function, medical records, and pharmacology.

They will learn practical skills such as caring for wounds, taking blood, checking vital signs, administering immunizations, carrying out simple lab tests and performing or assisting at minor procedures.

That instruction will take place three days a week. On the other two days, students will further improve their communication skills with vocational English as a Second Language (ESL) training. After passing all the coursework, they will complete a 320-hour externship at a local health care facility before receiving their certification and entering the job market.

Carmen Robinson, a 20-year veteran in education, will teach the medical classes. Ken Ryan will handle the ESL instruction. Manager of the program is Nain Lopez, assisted by Marilyn de la Cruz.

Twenty-six students are enrolled in the first cohort that begins April 26. A second group of 24 will begin studies in the fall. Most of the first group live in Richmond, while the others come from neighboring communities. They speak several different primary languages, including Spanish, Thai, Mandarin, Tagalog, Hindi, Punjabi, Creole, and Korean. Sixty persons applied for the initial cohort.

Selection for the project was based on particular guidelines. Because it is a Richmond community program, residents of that city received priority. Applicants had to be below the median income of the federal poverty level, and their command of the English language had to be intermediate, neither too limited nor too fluent.

“We were looking for a language level that with six months of English language support would be able to access this [medical] content,” Raffel said. “There’s a range of language competency in the program, but all of them need some work in speaking, writing or reading English.”

Because of the Chevron funding and the inter-agency collaboration, the program is free of charge. “It’s an amazing opportunity to be offered a training program for which you would usually have to pay a couple thousand dollars,” she said.

The new program is similar to a childhood education program that Catholic Charities has offered to limited-English speakers for the past 15 years. That program, which trains and places preschool teachers, has been very successful in employment placements and in community development.

One big difference between the two programs is the level of education required: childhood education requires college work, but certification as a medical assistant does not, Raffel explained.

“We did some labor market research, talked with other training programs and decided that an intensive eight-to-ten-month program in collaboration with the adult school would yield good results, that people would get good jobs at decent wages,” she said.

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