Herrera Acena, a long time professor in the Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), runs The Spanish Clinic of Brigham and Women’s out of the ambulatory building of the Harvard teaching hospital. In the late 1960s Herrera Acena observed that Latinos/as in the Boston area had trouble accessing adequate health care. “The barrier was not just linguistic,” he notes. “It was attitudinal, it was social, it was cultural, and the lack of congruence between the culture of the patient and the culture of the care giving institution really prevented good health care and humane and effective medicine.”
In 1971, with the approval of the director of Ambulatory Medicine, at what was then the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Herrera Acena began to hold one session a week of the outpatient practice in Spanish. “I wanted to give patients a kinder and more receptive ambience when they approached this enormous building,” he says. The Spanish clinic offered services in primary care, social services and mental health care. “The demand was there,” Herrera Acena says. “The clinic just took off.”