Senate Bill 853 mandated that, as of Jan. 1, 2009, anyone providing health insurance in California must ensure that their care providers have language services available to patients not proficient in English. But it’s questionable today whether providers and insurers are consistently and effectively following that law.

There is simply no way to monitor and enforce it, and it’s unlikely that health providers — crawling out of a recession — are making this a top priority.

It is a priority, however, as California grows and becomes more diverse. No state has more non-English speakers, yet our health workforce lacks ethnic and linguistic diversity. (According to a 2010 paper from UCLA researchers, California has 6.7 million people with limited English proficiency, yet only 31 percent of physicians speak Spanish or an Asian language.)

The real solution is a well-trained professional who can effectively interpret medical terminology, nuance, and cultural understanding — and be a member of the in-person team counseling a patient.

City College of San Francisco’s Health Care Interpreter program — which has trained interpreters in 13 languages, from Arabic to Vietnamese — has benefited from partners such as Kaiser Permanente and San Francisco General Hospital, which have provided guest lecturers, internship sites (so that students can get real-world practice while studying), and even classroom space.

See: SF Gate