Strengthening Medical Student Spanish Skills to Develop A Patient-Physician-Concordant Workforce

Patient-physician language concordance improves healthcare quality and outcomes. While Hispanic individuals comprise nearly 20% of the United States population, representing more than 41 million Spanish speakers, only a small proportion of physicians identify as Spanish speakers, and even fewer as non-Hispanic Spanish speakers. This disparity creates a need to strengthen medical student Spanish skills to develop a pipeline that creates a more patient-provider-concordant workforce. Here, we present the steps required to implement a credit-bearing medical Spanish elective for students at Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine (WMed) that aims to strengthen their multilingual and multicultural skills to address this barrier, thereby raising the standard of patient care and reducing misdiagnoses and adverse events.