Health Care Adjusts to a More Diverse America

Stateline: WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — On any given day at the Salud Clinic, Lucrecia Maas might see 22 patients. They come to the community health center tucked away in an office park here needing cavities filled, prescriptions renewed and babies vaccinated. When they start to speak, it’s rarely in English. Sometimes it’s Hindi. Or Dari. Or Hmong. Or Russian.

Maas is fluent in English and Spanish, but that gets her only so far. She often has to hop on the phone with a medical interpreter, who relays her questions to the patient and then translates the patient’s answers. “It just takes a little more time,” the nurse practitioner said.

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