School of Medicine

The UCSD Pacific Beach Free Clinic is home to hundreds of monolingual Spanish speaking patients. It has numerous resources available to cater to this population in facilitating patient care. Translator services, bilingual providers, and social workers all strive to ensure quality patient care in the presence of a language barrier. We introduced a novel approach to helping the language gap by creating an English as a Second Language class within the free clinic system. The idea of starting an English class began when it was observed that patients have 1-2 hours of idle waiting during their medical appointment. It was postulated that these patients might be interested in joining a class during that time instead of being idle.