Spanish speaking patients?

[i61164]

Is there a significant need for Spanish speaking psychiatrists in the South East? My Spanish skills are pretty shotty right now, but I'm going to spend two months in Mexico this summer to hopefully get to a point where I can have a decent conversation in Spanish. Do you think that will give me a significant advantage in the match process? Are there enough translators to go around so that PD's won't really care if they have a Spanish speaking resident?

 

[Doc Samson]

Is there a significant need for Spanish speaking psychiatrists in the South East? My Spanish skills are pretty shotty right now, but I'm going to spend two months in Mexico this summer to hopefully get to a point where I can have a decent conversation in Spanish. Do you think that will give me a significant advantage in the match process? Are there enough translators to go around so that PD's won't really care if they have a Spanish speaking resident?

I believe that hospitals are obligated by law to be able to provide appropriate interpreter services for their patients (looking at our paging directory, we have on-call interpreters for almost every conceivable language, and failing that there's always the AT&T international language line). That said, PDs love multilingual residents. It's a huge plus if you are fluent enough to conduct a psychiatric interview in another language.

 

[nortomaso]

Is there a significant need for Spanish speaking psychiatrists in the South East? My Spanish skills are pretty shotty right now, but I'm going to spend two months in Mexico this summer to hopefully get to a point where I can have a decent conversation in Spanish. Do you think that will give me a significant advantage in the match process? Are there enough translators to go around so that PD's won't really care if they have a Spanish speaking resident?

I'm no expert on the south, but when I went on my interview to Duke the chairman mentioned that there was an explosion of monolingual latinos in the Triangle, so you could definately use your language skills as a selling point there. I imagine Southern Florida would be another good place.