Medical Professionals in The USA Should be Able to Speak Fluent English
May 12th, 2008
We had a strange experience recently with our local pharmacy. As readers of this blog may know, my wife is pregnant with our second child. She has been taking prenatal vitamins prescribed by her doctor. When she went in to get it refilled, the pharmacist told her in very bad English that there was some issue with her insurance, but my wife could not understand any of the details this person was trying to say. My wife next started trying to check with the insurance company, who also seemed out of the loop, and meanwhile a weekend passed and she ran out of the medication.
That’s when I got involved and called the pharmacy to try to find out more about the issue before calling the insurance company. I got another pharmacist there, who also could not speak English. It took awhile, which surprised me, as I am used to dealing with poor English in the years I lived in Asia for work.
She also could not clarify the problem, so I asked if we could just buy the medication without using the insurance, as my wife and baby were going without it. She said yes, and then we spent some time trying to communicate over whether she meant it cost $60.50 or $16.50. It turned out to be $16.50, to which I said they should have let us know we could buy it for that amount in the first place and it is ridiculous to have blocked my wife from getting what she needs. Again it took awhile to understand, but I finally realized her next point was an attack on prenatal vitamins, as “millions (of people) go without this all over (the) world”. At that point, I told her we of course following doctor’s orders and insisted she put the manager on the phone.
It turned out that the manager was some kid in charge of the grocery store, but he let me know this was not the first issue recently with the pharmacy where he ended up talking to upset customers and that he was reporting it regional management… At least he seemed polite and could speak English. Meanwhile, I also complained to Sav-On’s corporate office and am waiting to hear back from them.
You can be certain that Sav-On and Albertsons have lost this customer, but more importantly, it is very scary and just wrong that people in key positions of the medical industry cannot speak understandable English. I am not in a position to judge his or her technical qualifications, but when there are clearly situations like this, where the patients cannot understand the medical professional, there is obviously a huge potential for problems.
I am considering writing our legislators that there should be a SPOKEN English test for folks seeking this sort of work in the USA.
Sincerely,
Todd Lipscomb
Founder of www.MadeinUSAForever.com
Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 11:47 pmand is filed under Uncategorized.
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