Increasing Access to Care for Cultural and Linguistic Minorities: Ethnicity-Specific Health Care Organizations and Infrastructure

Racial and ethnic disparities in health care have been attributed in part to cultural and linguistic dissonance between certain patient populations and the health care system. Yet in the long term, structural solutions for ameliorating health care disparities have not been forthcoming. One strategy for increasing access to care for cultural and linguistic minorities is ethnicity-specific subsystems of care. The historical experiences of the Chinese community in San Francisco are used to reconstruct the evolution of its ethnicity-specific health care infrastructure and to create an organizational development model for ethnicity-specific health care organizations and infrastructures. The four stages of the model include developing and recruiting a bicultural and bilingual health care workforce, structuring health care resources for maximum accessibility, expanding health care organizations, and integrating ethnicity-specific health care resources into the mainstream health care system. Policy recommendations to develop ethnicity-specific subsystems of care are presented.