It is hard to stay healthy without information, and it’s hard to get information here without English. A lecture in Chinese helps fill a gap in Flushing.

An arrow traced the gnarled forms of arteries on a projector inside Lang Auditorium at the New York Hospital of Queens. “Craniotomy,” “burr hole,” and “micro surgical clips” were among the only English words said from behind the podium. On a rainy Saturday morning, a group of fifteen had gathered to hear the day’s lecture on stroke prevention.

Anita Co, a local resident of Filipino-Chinese descent, sat in the audience. Co regularly attends the monthly lectures, part of the hospital’s Community Health Initiatives program, launched in 2014. The series is tailored to native Chinese speakers, most of whom lack Co’s English skills. New York Hospital of Queens says this population makes up 30 percent of its patients. The hospital is located in Flushing, part of Queens Community District 7, where 55.7 percent of residents are foreign-born and 42.8 percent speak English “less than very well,” according to the Department of NYC Planning. Limited English proficiency remains a problem in the neighborhood—both on streets and in hospital rooms.

Co can attest to this. As a volunteer at New York Hospital of Queens a couple of years ago, she helped resolve an argument between doctor and patient, the result of miscommunication. “The doctor said the patient was yelling and had a bad attitude,” said Co. “So I asked the patient, what did you say?” The patient told her, “‘I was not swearing. I said I was in a lot of pain—I’m in pain!’ They just didn’t understand each other.”

Co’s experience is one example of hospitals’ ongoing struggle to meet the linguistic and cultural needs of the communities they serve. And it is not an isolated case.

New York City is home to over 1.8 million speakers of limited English proficiency, according to the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. The city’s largest LEP minorities speak Spanish, at 50.4 percent of all LEP speakers, and Chinese, at 16.5 percent. A recent NYC Planning report shows New York’s foreign-born population has risen steadily in the last decade, hitting a new high in 2011, when foreign-born citizens accounted for over 3 million in of the city’s 8 million residents. More.

See: NY City Lens

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