Salinas, California

Of the hundreds of thousands of indigenous people living and working throughout California, nearly thirty thousand of them live in the Salinas Valley and go to Natividad Hospital for health care. In a state where nearly 90% of the population speaks English or Spanish, many of these indigenous people can communicate with virtually no one outside of their immediate family.

Natividad is one of California’s 21 public safety net hospitals, a place where people can show up with a need and be seen regardless of insurance access. Even though the hospital had equal access at the core of its mission, ten years ago Natividad had a glaring issue that was mirrored by virtually every other major organization in the state – pervasive language barriers that were causing problems in doctor’s offices and operating rooms. Jennifer Williams has worked at Natividad for over a decade and remembers the time well: “We didn’t even have Spanish interpreters. We noticed a lot of our patients were more comfortable in their native language, so we said, okay, let’s train people as interpreters in Spanish… we figured out very quickly that there was a bigger need.”