ABSTRACT
Each day, hospitals and clinics around the United States encounter limited English proficient (LEP) patients: patients whom the United States Census Bureau defines as “speak[ing] English less than ‘very well’” (American Medical Association [AMA], 2006, p. 1). And how many prospective LEP patients are there in the United States? According to the Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey, 19.6% of Americans over the age of 5 speak a language other than English at home. Of that population of approximately 55 million individuals, 43.8% (i.e., 24 million people) speak English “less than very well” (Languages spoken at home, 2009). The breakdown of those who speak English “less than very well” is as follows:
• 46.9% of Spanish speakers, • 48.5% of Asian and Pacific Islanders, • 32.8% of Indo-European language speakers, speak English “not well” or
“not at all.” (Languages spoken at home, 2009)
These numbers imply that 10% of Americans over the age of 5 do not speak English “very well,” and that is a startling number. These populations, moreover, are distributed unevenly across the United States, with most of the individuals who speak less than “very well” concentrated in the western states, the Southwest, Florida, and the Northeast. Generally speaking, this number means that 1 in 10 patients in U.S. hospitals need language assistance of some sort in order to obtain appropriate health care.
