Addressing Language Access Issues in Your Practice: A Toolkit for ...

7 CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF FAMILY PHYSICIANS
Determining current and future demand
Knowing who lives in your catchment area and who your likely patient population will be in the future will also
help you develop a language access strategy that makes long-term sense for your practice. There are several ways to
get to know who your neighbors are and whom you may be serving over the next 5-10 years.
• One way to judge who lives in your neck of the woods is to look at the demographic make-up of the geographical
area that your practice serves. The 2000 U.S. Census has given us the opportunity to get this information with
relative ease.
American Factfinder is a web-based program that gives you immediate access to the data from the 2000 census.
This site gives language demographics down to the census track level. Go to:
http://www.census.gov/mp/www/spectab/languagespokenSTP224.xls, and click on CA (California). Then scroll
down to find the county and/or census track in which you are interested. This chart will tell you the number of people
who speak English less than “very well,” which can be taken as one measure of limited English proficiency.
While this chart does not list the individual languages in as much detail as you might like, another chart does. On
the same American Factfinder website, go to Summary File
3, Table PCT10. This table lists languages spoken at home
by individuals 5+-years-old, by state.
• The Modern Languages Association has a language map
based on data from the 2000 U.S. census that allows you to
search for 30 different languages by state, county, city, and
even zip code. Using the map is a bit cumbersome, because
you have to search by each language separately, but it does
give you a graphic view of where particular language populations
are located. Again, not all of these speakers are
necessarily LEP, but this map gives you an idea of the ethnic
communities in your catchment area.
http://www.mla.org.
Knowing who lives in
your catchment area and
who your likely patient population
will be in the future
will also help you develop a
language access strategy ...
• If you hear reference to a language among your patients that you’ve never heard of, try looking it up on
Ethnologue. This website gives an index to more than 6,000 world languages, including a description of each language
and where it is spoken. http://www.ethnologue.com.
• Another way to track the patient population that you may be serving in the future is to develop relationships
with your state or local refugee resettlement organization who will be able to alert you when new refugee groups
are arriving into your geographic catchment area.
• As you track speakers of foreign languages, don’t forget to also track the presence of the deaf and hard-of-hearing
population in your catchment area.
Now you know who your current patients are, who your future patients could be, and whom you may likely be
serving in the future. The next piece of information you need is what resources are available to help you meet the
language needs of your LEP patients.