This program was the best thing I could have done for myself--and for my future patients--before starting med school.
- Ben Rosenfeld
Mission Statement
Somos Hermanos aims to reduce the disparity in health care access and quality that results when health care providers are unable to effectively communicate with Latino patients due to language and cultural barriers. The Somos Hermanos Student Immersion Program (SIP) seeks to address this problem through increasing the number of bilingual, culturally competent health care professionals.
Program Description
The Student Immersion Program is a six-month language and cultural immersion program based in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. The program combines intensive Spanish instruction, a comprehensive lecture series, socially and culturally relevant volunteer projects, weekly activities, and a trip to El Salvador and Mexico to ensure our participants gain the language capability and cultural competency desperately needed to serve marginalized, Spanish-speaking Latino populations.
The Somos Hermanos Student Immersion Program targets U.S. students pursuing health care professions including medicine, nursing, dentistry, psychology, physical therapy, health promotion, and other health-related fields. The program is designed for students who have completed their undergraduate studies and are taking a year off of school (e.g. deferring acceptance or applying to schools) before they begin medical school or health-related graduate programs. Somos Hermanos targets this group because comprehensive language acquisition is a time consuming process, necessitating more than just a few weeks of exposure. Additionally, most medical and health care graduate students begin interacting with patients as soon as their first year and can therefore both utilize and improve upon their language skills and cultural competency throughout their course of study.
Somos Hermanos holds two sessions each year, from January through June, and from July through December. Please refer to the individual pages on language instruction, volunteer projects, lectures, activities, and El Salvador and Mexico for more detailed information about each of these components of the Student Immersion Program.
Brief Background of the Problem
Spanish is the primary language for 11% of the US population and 44.5% of Los Angeles County residents. While Latin Americans comprise the largest minority group in the US, they receive disproportionately low access to lower quality health care.1 The National Healthcare Disparities Report states that having “providers who meet the needs of individual patients and with whom patients can develop a relationship based on mutual communication and trust” is an essential component of health care access - a component that is often not addressed for Latinos in the US.2 In fact, language barriers and lack of cultural understanding account for 37% of health care access problems, while the inability to afford health care accounts for only 18% of access problems. The goal of the Somos Hermanos Student Immersion Program is to reduce these barriers to quality health care by increasing the number of bilingual and culturally competent health care providers in the U.S.
Note: for more background information or articles pertaining to this topic, please contact us at info@somoshermanos.org
1 California. California State Department of Transportation. Census Data: Ethnicity by City. 2000. 18 Feb. 2006
2 National Healthcare Disparities Report. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2005.