In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr. Leah Karliner. Dr. Karliner is Professor in Residence in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco in the United States. She is Director of the Center for Aging in Diverse Communities and Director of the Multiethnic Health Equity Research Center. She is both a practicing general internist and a health services researcher, with expertise in practice-based and communication research. An important aspect of her scholarly work centres on improving quality of care for patients with limited English proficiency, and the goal of her research agenda is aimed at achieving health equity through improved communication and clinical outcomes.
In this episode, Brynn and Leah discuss a 2024 paper that Leah co-authored entitled “Language Access Systems Improvement initiative: impact on professional interpreter utilisation, a natural experiment”. The paper details a study that investigated two ways of improving the quality of clinical care for limited English proficiency (LEP) patients in English-dominant healthcare contexts, by:
- Certifying bilingual clinicians to use their non-English language skills directly with patients; and
- Simultaneously increasing easy access to professional interpreters by instituting on-demand remote video interpretation.
Brynn and Leah talk about the results of this study and what they mean for improved communication with LEP patients in healthcare.
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The Multiethnic Health Equity Research Center is based at UCSF (Image credit: UCSF)
References
A discussion about the terms “limited English proficiency” (LEP) and “non-English language preference” (NELP) in healthcare, which is also laid out nicely in Ortega et al.’s (2021) Rethinking the Term “Limited English Proficiency” to Improve Language-Appropriate Healthcare for All
Leung et al.’s (2025) paper entitled Partial language concordance in primary care communication: What is lost, what is gained, and how to optimize
And for more Language on the Move resources about the intersection between language and healthcare:
- Reducing Barriers to Language Assistance in Hospital
- Language policy at an abortion clinic
- Mismatched public health communication costs lives in Pakistan
- Why it’s important to use Indigenous languages in health communication
- Linguistic diversity in a time of crisis: Language challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic
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