Foreign-trained health care professionals in most states must take an English proficiency test if their first language is not English, but in too many cases, it’s written only which is the easiest method to pass (in addition to speaking and writing).
When I worked at the grocery store around 2000, I had to transfer lots of prescriptions every spring and fall for snowbirds, and if I was calling a Walgreens in Florida, I could pretty much guarantee that I would get a female Asian pharmacist who barely spoke English.
I had a bar conversation with an Indian IT guy who works in the healthcare field. Take this source for whatever you think it’s worth, but he told me, not really to my surprise, that up to a third of the physicians in this country are from India. Some might have lived in the US for a long time and have become Americanized, but it shows how dependent the US healthcare system is on imported healthcare workers. The demands of an aging population are such that there’s a chronic shortage of care workers. Dropzone’s story probably isn’t unique and probably isn’t going to change anytime soon.
It’s possible that they know more English than they let on and are making a conscious, passive aggressive decision not to speak with dropzone in English, but there are a lot of Hindi speakers with genuinely poor English communication skills. They might understand and be able to communicate in basic English, but not much beyond that. It’s possible that they’re afraid to communicate in English and embarrassed by their own lack of proficiency and thus deliberately avoid it and speak with each other in Hindi. Also, we’re assuming that they’re speaking Hindi and not Tamil or Telegu or something else. India has hundreds of different languages.
The difference is in senior management. People with superior language and intercultural communication skills end up leading teams because their ability to communicate enables them to do that whereas those with less proficiency remain employed in technical positions. If they can “speak” in algorithms, Java, and so forth, then they can remain employed as long as there’s a demand for their skillset and as long as the immigration door doesn’t shut.
If they made that demand, they’d go out of business: the overlap between “CNA-Trained”, “Fluent English” and “willing to work pittance wages” just isn’t enough to staff places like that. Presumably they could find more people if they paid more, but that might raise their costs to more than the market will bear.
Yet short by Spanish standards. That source is playing stupid on me (it seem I’ve alienated the innertubes as well as India) but I recall it begins with, no I don’t want to out her, a letter of the alphabet.
For what it is worth, on my thrice-weekly excursions to dialysis, the charge nurse is from the Philippines, and has quite the language accent, while the nurse I wind up with mostly hails from the Caribbean, not sure if she is from Jamaica or Haiti, but she has the best track record of hitting the fistula, but I only get about one word she says in five.
I work with an auditor at my agency who is frequently frustrated because he has struggled to move up in the organization. He is a very smart guy, gets along with people, and is an amazing auditor. But his big stumbling block is that people have trouble with his Filipino accent.
He has talked to me about it multiple times and asks me (a white guy) if I ever have trouble understanding him. I tell him no, but have to remind him that I grew up in a neighborhood where most residents were from the Philippines and I also lived on Guam for a couple of years (they have a massive Filipino population along with the native Chamorros). So I’m a bad one to ask.
I do tease him on occasion about being a foreigner though, because he’s from Canada.
As I said, take the source for what it’s worth…which might not be much, admittedly. it’s entirely possible I misheard him as well. I’m certainly not going to the mat to defend the post.
That being said, I stand by the fact that there’s a major shortage of healthcare workers and foreign-born doctors are brought in to fill that void.
BTW, I approve of “Christ on a mothflapping pogo stick.” Haven’t heard that one before.
No, because I didn’t put it out there as a valid source of information and I can admit when I’m wrong. I was factually incorrect in repeating the statistic that up to a third of doctors were Indian. If I went into the discussion with more certitude, I would double down on it.
It’s okay to be wrong once in a while. It doesn’t change the fact that many other times, I’m pretty fucking correct.
To be fair to asahi,the statement was made with a massive disclaimer about the source of the claim and the circumstance in which it was made, and there was no endorsement of its validity.
And asahi, my iPhone really dislikes you. Twice now it tried to autocorrect your name to asshole. I have no idea what you did to piss it off so much.
